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DURABLE 



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OF LIFE 



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THE DURABLE SATISFACTIONS 
OF LIFE 



THE 

DURABLE 
SATISFACTIONS 

OF 

LIFE 

BY 

CHARLES W. ELIOT 




N EW Y ORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



COPYRIGHT, 1 9IO, 
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 



-T>£ 



©CI.A265913 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



THE DURABLE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE I 

THE HAPPY LIFE II 

JOHN GILLEY 57 

GREAT RICHES IO7 

THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE I55 



THE DURABLE SATISFACTIONS 
OF LIFE 



An address given to the new students at Harvard 
University, on October j, Jpoj 



THE 

DURABLE SATISFACTIONS 
OF LIFE 

FOR educated men what are the sources 
of the solid and durable satisfactions 
of life? I hope you are all aiming at 
the 'solid, durable satisfactions of life, not 
primarily the gratifications of this moment 
or of to-morrow, but the satisfactions that 
are going to last and grow. So far as I 
have seen, there is one indispensable 
foundation for the satisfactions of life — 
health. A young man ought to be a 
clean, wholesome, vigorous animal. That 
is the foundation for everything else, 
and I hope you will all be that, if you 
are nothing more. We have to build 
everything in this world of domestic joy 
and professional success, everything of a 
useful, honorable career, on bodily whole- 
someness and vitality. 

[33 



THE DURABLE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 

This being a clean, wholesome, vigor- 
ous animal involves a good deal. It in- 
volves not condescending to the ordinary- 
barbaric vices. One must avoid drunk- 
enness, gluttony, licentiousness, and get- 
ting into dirt of any kind, in order to 
be a clean, wholesome, vigorous animal. 
Still, none of you would be content with 
this achievement as the total outcome of 
your lives. It is a happy thing to have 
in youth what are called animal spirits — 
a very descriptive phrase ; but animal 
spirits do not last even in animals; they 
belong to the kitten or puppy stage. It 
is a wholesome thing to enjoy for a time, 
or for a time each day all through life, 
sports and active bodily exercise. These 
are legitimate enjoyments, but, if made the 
main object of life, they tire. They cease 
to be a source of durable satisfaction. 
Play must be incidental in a satisfactory 
life. 

What is the next thing, then, that we 
want in order to make sure of durable 
satisfactions in life? We need a strong 
mental grip, a wholesome capacity for 

[4] 



THE DURABLE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 

hard work. It is intellectual power and 
aims that we need. In ail the professions 
— learned, scientific, or industrial — large 
mental enjoyments should come to edu- 
cated men. The great distinction between 
the privileged class to which you belong, 
the class that has opportunity for pro- 
longed education, and the much larger 
class that has not that opportunity, is that 
the educated class lives mainly by the ex- 
ercise of intellectual powers and gets there- 
fore much greater enjoyment out of life 
than the much larger class that earns a 
livelihood chiefly by the exercise of bodily 
powers. You ought to obtain here, there- 
fore, the trained capacity for mental labor, 
rapid, intense, and sustained. That is the 
great thing to get in college, long before 
the professional school is entered. Get it 
now. Get it in the years of college life. 
It is the main achievement of college life 
to win this mental force, this capacity for 
keen observation, just inference, and sus- 
tained thought, for everything that we 
mean by the reasoning power of man. 
That capacity will be the main source of 

1 5] 



THE DURABLE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 

intellectual joys and of happiness and con- 
tent throughout a long and busy life. 

But there is something more, some- 
thing beyond this acquired power of intel- 
lectual labor. As Shakespeare puts it, 
" the purest treasure mortal times afford is 
spotless reputation." How is that treasure 
won ? It comes by living with honor, on 
honor. Most of you have begun already 
to live honorably and honored, for the 
life of honor begins early. Some things 
the honorable man cannot do, never does. 
He never wrongs or degrades a woman. 
He never oppresses or cheats a person 
weaker or poorer than himself. He never 
betrays a trust. He is honest, sincere, 
candid, and generous. It is not enough 
to be honest. An honorable man must be 
generous, and I do not mean generous 
with money only. I mean generous in his 
judgments of men and women, and of the 
nature and prospects of mankind. Such 
generosity is a beautiful attribute of the 
man of honor. 

How does honor come to a man ? 
What is the evidence of the honorable 

[6] 



THE DURABLE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 

life ? What is the tribunal which declares 
at last, "This was an honorable man"? 
You look now for the favorable judgment 
of your elders, — of parents and teachers 
and older students ; but these elders will 
not be your final judges, and you had better 
get ready now in college to appear before 
the ultimate tribunal, the tribunal of your 
contemporaries and the younger genera- 
tions. It is the judgment of your con- 
temporaries that is most important to you ; 
and you will find that the judgment of 
your contemporaries is made up alarm- 
ingly early, — it may be made up this year 
in a way that sometimes lasts for life and 
beyond. It is made up in part by persons 
to whom you have never spoken, by per- 
sons who in your view do not know you, 
and who get only a general impression of 
you ; but always it is contemporaries whose 
judgment is formidable and unavoidable. 
Live now in the fear of that tribunal, — 
not an abject fear, because independence is 
an indispensable quality in the honorable 
man. There is an admirable phrase in the 
Declaration of Independence, a document 

m 



THE DURABLE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 

which it was the good fashion of my time 
for boys to commit to memory. I doubt 
if that fashion still obtains. Some of our 
public action looks as if it did not. " When, 
in the course of human events, it becomes 
necessary for one people to dissolve the 
political bands which have connected them 
with another, and to assume among the 
powers of the earth the separate and equal 
station to which the laws of nature and of 
nature's God entitle them, a decent respect 
to the opinions of mankind requires that 
they should declare the causes which impel 
them to the separation." That phrase — 
" a decent respect " — is a very happy one. 
Cherish cc a decent respect to the opinions 
of mankind," but never let that interfere 
with your personal declaration of independ- 
ence. Begin now to prepare for the judg- 
ment of the ultimate human tribunal. 

Look forward to the important crises of 
your life. They are nearer than you are 
apt to imagine. It is a very safe protective 
rule to live to-day as if you were going to 
marry a pure woman within a month. That 
rule you will find a safeguard for worthy 

[ 8 ] 



THE DURABLE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 

living. It is a good rule to endeavor hour 
by hour and week after week to learn to 
work hard. It is not well to take four 
minutes to do what you can accomplish 
in three. It is not well to take four years 
to do what you can perfectly accomplish 
in three. It is well to learn to work in- 
tensely. You will hear a good deal of 
advice about letting your soul grow and 
breathing in without effort the atmosphere 
of a learned society or place of learning. 
Well, you cannot help breathing and you 
cannot help growing ; those processes will 
take care of themselves. The question 
for you from day to day is how to learn 
to work to advantage, and college is the 
place and now is the time to win mental 
power. And, lastly, live to-day and every 
day like a man of honor. 



[9] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 



First read before Phillips Academy, Exeter, N. H. y 
but later rewritten 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

THE MORAL PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSE 

MY subject is " The Happy Life/' I 
address here especially young peo- 
ple who have passed the period of child- 
hood, with its unreflecting gayety, fleeting 
shadows, gusty griefs, and brief despairs, 
and have entered, under conditions of sin- 
gular privilege, upon rational and respon- 
sible living. For you happiness must be 
conscious, considerate, and consistent with 
habits of observing, reading, and reflecting. 
Now, reflecting has always been a grave 
business, 

a Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 
And leaden-eyed despairs " ; 

and it must be confessed that our times 
present some new obstacles to a life of 
thoughtful happiness. Until this century 
the masses of mankind were almost dumb ; 

[ 13] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

but now their moans and complaints have 
become audible through telephone, tele- 
graph, and rotary press. The millions are 
now saying what the moody poets have 
always said: 

" The flower that smiles to-day 

To-morrow dies, 
All that we wish to stay 

Tempts, and then flies. 
What is this world's delight ? 
Lightning that mocks the night, 
Brief even as bright." 

The gloomy moralist is still repeating : 
" I have seen all the works that are done 
under the sun, and behold ! all is vanity 
and vexation of spirit." 

The manual laborers of to-day, who are 
much better off than the same classes of 
laborers have been in any earlier times, 
are saying just what Shelley said to the 
men of England in 1819: 

" The seed ye sow another reaps, ] 
The wealth ye find another keeps, 
The robes ye weave another wears, 
The arms ye forge another bears." 

[ 14] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

They would adopt without change the 
words in which that eminent moralist, 
Robinson Crusoe, a century earlier, de- 
scribed the condition of the laboring 
classes : cc The men of labor spent their 
strength in daily struggling for bread to 
maintain the vital strength they labored 
with ; so living in a daily circulation of 
sorrow, living but to work, and working 
but to live, as if daily bread were the only 
end of wearisome life, and a wearisome life 
the only occasion of daily bread. ,> 

Matthew Arnold calls his love to come 
to the window and listen to the " melan- 
choly, long-withdrawing roar " of the sea 
upon the moonlit beach at Dover; and 
these are his dismal words to her: 

"Ah, love, let us be true 
To one another ! for the world, which seems 
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
So various, so beautiful, so new, 
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; 
And we are here as on a darkling plain 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night." 

[ 15] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

The poets are by no means the only of- 
fenders ; the novelists and scientists take 
their turn. The fiction of this century 
deals much with the lives of the wretched, 
dissolute, and vicious, and with the most 
unjust and disastrous conditions of modern 
society. A fresh difficulty in the way of 
natural happiness is the highly speculative 
opinion, lately put forward by men of 
science and promptly popularized, to the 
effect that external nature offsets every 
good with an evil, and that the visible uni- 
verse is unmoral, or indifferent as regards 
right and wrong, revealing no high pur- 
pose or intelligent trend. This is, indeed, 
a melancholy notion ; but that it should 
find acceptance at this day, and really 
make people miserable, only illustrates the 
curious liability of the human intelligence 
to sudden collapse. The great solid con- 
viction which science, within the past three 
centuries, has enabled thinking men and 
women to settle down on is that all dis- 
covered and systematized knowledge is as 
nothing compared with the undiscovered, 
and that a boundless universe of un- 

[16] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

imagined facts and forces interpenetrates 
and encompasses what seems the universe 
to us. In spite of this impregnable con- 
viction people distress themselves because, 
forsooth, they cannot discern the moral 
purpose or complete spiritual intent of 
this dimly seen, fractional universe which 
is all we know. Why should they dis- 
cern it ? 



LOWER AND HIGHER PLEASURES 

It is, then, in spite of many old and 
some new discouragements that we are all 
seeking the happy life. We know that 
education spreads, knowledge grows, and 
public liberty develops ; but can we be sure 
that public and private happiness increase ? 
What the means and sources of happiness 
are in this actual world, with our present 
surroundings and with no reference to joys 
or sorrows in any other world, is a natu- 
ral, timely, and wholesome inquiry. We 
may be sure that one principle will hold 
throughout the whole pursuit of thought- 
ful happiness, — the principle that the best 

1 17] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

way to secure future happiness is to be as 
happy as is rightfully possible to-day. To 
secure any desirable capacity for the future, 
near or remote, cultivate it to-day. What 
would be the use of immortality for a per- 
son who cannot use well half an hour ? 
as&s Emerson. 

In trying to enumerate the positive sat- 
isfactions which an average man may rea- 
sonably expect to enjoy in this world, I of 
course take no account of those too com- 
mon objects of human pursuit, — wealth, 
power, and fame, — first, because they do 
not as a rule contribute to happiness ; and, 
secondly, because they are unattainable by 
mankind in general. I invite you to con- 
sider only those means of happiness which 
the humble and obscure millions may 
possess. The rich and famous are too 
few to affect appreciably the sum of hu- 
man happiness. I begin with satisfactions 
of sense. 

Sensuous pleasures, like eating and 
drinking, are sometimes described as ani- 
mal, and therefore unworthy. It must be 
confessed, however, that men are in this life 

[ 18] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

animals all through, — whatever else they 
may be, — and that they have a right to 
enjoy without reproach those pleasures of 
animal existence which maintain health, 
strength, and life itself. Familiar ascetic 
and pessimistic dogmas to the contrary 
notwithstanding, these pleasures, taken 
naturally and in moderation, are all pure, 
honorable, and wholesome. Moreover, all 
attempts to draw a line between bodily 
satisfactions on the one hand and mental 
or spiritual satisfactions on the other, and 
to distinguish the first as beastly indul- 
gences and the second as the only pleasures 
worthy of a rational being, have failed and 
must fail ; for it is manifestly impossible 
to draw a sharp line of division between 
pleasures, and to say that these are bodily 
and those intellectual or moral. Are the 
pleasures of sight and hearing bodily or 
mental? Is delight in harmony or in 
color a pleasure of the sense or of the 
imagination ? What sort of a joy is a 
thing of beauty ? Is it an animal or a 
spiritual joy ? Is the delight of a mother 
in fondling her smiling baby a physical or 

[19] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

a moral delight ? But though we cannot 
divide pleasures into animal and moral, 
unworthy and worthy, we can, neverthe- 
less, divide them into lower and higher 
pleasures, — the lower, those which, like 
eating and drinking, prompt to the mainte- 
nance and reproduction of life and which 
can be impaired or destroyed by prolon- 
gation or repetition ; the higher, those 
which, like the pleasures of the eye or ear, 
seem to be ends in themselves. In the 
lower there can be destructive excess in 
the higher excess is impossible. 

Recognizing, then, that there are higher 
pleasures than eating and drinking, let us 
clearly perceive that three meals a day all 
one's life not only give in themselves a 
constantly renewed innocent satisfaction, 
but provide the necessary foundation for 
all other satisfactions. Taking food and 
drink is a great enjoyment for healthy 
people, and those who do not enjoy eating 
seldom have much capacity for enjoyment 
or usefulness of any sort. Under ordinary 
circumstances it is by no means a purely 
bodily pleasure. We do not eat alone, 

[20] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

but in families, or sets of friends and com- 
rades ; and the table is the best centre of 
friendships and of the domestic affections. 
When, therefore, a working-man says that 
he has worked all his life to procure a 
subsistence for himself and his family, he 
states that he has secured some fundamen- 
tal satisfactions, namely, food, productive 
employment, and family life. The satis- 
faction of eating is so completely a matter 
of appetite that such distinction as there is 
between the luxurious and the hardy in 
regard to this enjoyment is altogether in 
favor of the hardy. Who does not re- 
member some rough and perhaps scanty 
meal in camp, or on the march, or at sea, 
or in the woods, which was infinitely more 
delicious than the most luxurious dinner 
during indoor or sedentary life ? But that 
appetite depends on health. Take good 
care, then, of your teeth and your stomachs, 
and be ashamed not of enjoying your food, 
but of not enjoying it. There was a deal 
of sound human nature in the unexpected 
reply of the dying old woman to her min- 
ister's leading question : " Here at the 

[21 ] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

end of a long life, which of the Lord's 
mercies are you most thankful for ? " Her 
eye brightened as she answered, "My 
victuals." 

Let us count next pleasures through 
the eye. Unlike the other senses, the 
eye is always at work except when we 
sleep, and may consequently be the ve- 
hicle of far more enjoyment than any other 
organ of sense. It has given our race its 
ideas of infinity, symmetry, grace, and 
splendor ; it is a chief source of child- 
hood's joys, and throughout life the guide 
to almost all pleasurable activities. The 
pleasure it gives us, however, depends 
largely upon the amount of attention we 
pay to the pictures which it incessantly 
sets before the brain. Two men walk 
along the same road : one notices the blue 
depths of the sky, the floating clouds, the 
opening leaves upon the trees, the green 
grass, the yellow buttercups, and the far 
stretch of the open fields ; the other has 
precisely the same pictures on his retina, 
but pays no attention to them. One sees, 
and the other does not see ; one enjoys an 

[22 ] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

4 

unspeakable pleasure, and the other loses 
that pleasure which is as free to him as the 
air. The beauties which the eye reveals 
are infinitely various in quality and scale : 
one mind prefers the minute, another the 
vast ; one the delicate and tender, another 
the coarse and rough ; one the inanimate 
things, another the animate creation. The 
whole outward world is the kingdom of 
the observant eye. He who enters into 
any part of that kingdom to possess it has 
a store of pure enjoyment in life which is 
literally inexhaustible and immeasurable. 
His eyes alone will give him a life worth 
living. 

Next comes the ear as a minister of 
enjoyment, but next at a great interval. 
The average man probably does not rec- 
ognize that he gets much pleasure through 
hearing. He thinks that his ears are to 
him chiefly a convenient means of human 
intercourse. But let him experience a 
temporary deafness, and he will learn that 
many a keen delight came to him through 
the ear. He will miss the beloved voice, 
the merry laugh, the hum of the city, the 

[233 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

distant chime, the song of birds, the run- 
ning brook, the breeze in the trees, the 
lapping wavelets, and the thundering 
beach ; and he will learn that familiar 
sounds have been to him sources of pure 
delight, — an important element in his 
well-being. Old Izaak Walton found in 
the lovely sounds of earth a hint of 
heaven : 

" How joyed my heart in the rich melodies 
That overhead and round me did arise ! 
The moving leaves — the water's gentle 

flow — 
Delicious music hung on every bough. 
Then said I in my heart, If that the Lord 
Such lovely music on the earth accord ; 
If to weak, sinful man such sounds are given, 
Oh ! what must be the melody of heaven ! " 

A high degree of that fine pleasure which 
music gives is not within the reach of all, 
yet there are few to whom the pleasure is 
wholly denied. To take part in produc- 
ing harmony, as in part-singing, gives the 
singers an intense pleasure, which is doubt- 
less partly physical and partly mental. I 

[ 24 ] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

am told that to play good music at sight, 
as one of several performers playing dif- 
ferent instruments, is as keen a sensuous 
and intellectual enjoyment as the world 
affords. 

These pleasures through the eye and 
ear are open in civilized society to all who 
have the will to seek them, and the intel- 
ligence to cultivate the faculties through 
which they are enjoyed. They are quite 
as likely to bless him who works with 
hand or brain all day for a living as him 
who lives inactive on his own savings or 
on those of other people. The outward 
world yields them spontaneously to every 
healthy body and alert mind ; but the ac- 
tive mind is as essential to the winning of 
them as the sound body. 

There is one great field of knowledge, 
too much neglected in our schools and 
colleges, which offers to the student end- 
less pleasures and occupations through the 
trained and quickened senses of sight, 
hearing, and touch. I mean the wide 
field called natural history, which com- 
prehends geography, meteorology, bot- 

[25] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

any, zoology, mineralogy, and geology. 
Charles Darwin, the greatest naturalist of 
the past century, said that with natural 
history and the domestic affections a man 
might be truly happy. Not long ago I 
was urging a young naturalist of twenty- 
six to spend the next summer in Europe. 
He thought it was hardly right for him to 
allow himself that indulgence ; and when 
I urged that the journey would be very 
enjoyable as well as profitable, he replied : 
"Yes; but you know I can be happy 
anywhere in the months when things are 
growing." He meant that the pleasures 
of observation were enough for him when 
he could be out of doors. That young 
man was poor, delicate in health, and 
of a retiring and diffident disposition ; 
yet life was full of keenest interest to 
him. 

Our century is distinguished by an 
ardent return of civilized man to that love 
of nature from which books and urban life 
had temporarily diverted him. The po- 
etry and the science of our times alike fos- 
ter this love, and add to the delights which 

[26] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

come to lovers of nature through the keen 
senses, the delights of the soaring imagi- 
nation and the far-reaching reason. In 
many of our mental moods the contem- 
plation of Nature brings peace and joy. 
Her patient ways shame hasty little man; 
her vastnesses calm and elevate his troubled 
mind ; her terrors fill him with awe ; her 
inexplicable and infinite beauties with de- 
light. Her equal care for the least things 
and the greatest corrects his scale of values. 
He cannot but believe that the vast ma- 
terial frame of things is informed and 
directed by an infinite Intelligence and 
Will, just as his little animal body is 
informed by his own conscious mind and 
will. 

It is apparent from what I have said of 
pleasures through the eye and ear, and from 
contact with nature, that a good measure 
of out-of-door life is desirable for him who 
would secure the elements of a happy life. 
The urban tendency of our population 
militates against free access to out-of-door 
delights. The farmer works all day in the 
fields, and his children wander at will in 

[27] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

the open air ; the sailor can see at any 
moment the whole hemisphere of the 
heavens and the broad plain of the sea ; 
but the city resident may not see a tree or 
a shrub for weeks together, and can barely 
discern a narrow strip of sky, as he walks 
at the bottom of the deep ditches we call 
streets. The wise man whose work is in 
the city, and indoors at that, will take 
every possible opportunity to escape into 
the fresh air and the open country. Cer- 
tain good tendencies in this respect have 
appeared within recent years. Hundreds 
of thousands of people who must work 
daily in compact cities now live in open 
suburbs ; cities provide parks and decorated 
avenues of approach to parks ; out-of-door 
sports and exercises become popular ; safe 
country boarding-schools for city children 
are multiplied, and public holidays and 
half-holidays increase in number. These 
are appreciable compensations for the dis- 
advantages of city life. The urban popu- 
lation which really utilizes these facilities 
may win a keener enjoyment from nature 
than the rural population, to whom nat- 

[ 28 ] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

ural beauty is at every moment accessible. 
The cultivation of mind and the increased 
sensibility which city life develops heighten 
the delight in natural beauty. Moreover, 
though man destroys much natural love- 
liness in occupying any territory for pur- 
poses of residence or business, he also 
creates much loveliness of grassy fields and 
banks, mirroring waters, perfectly devel- 
oped trees, graceful shrubs, and brilliant 
flowers. In these days no intelligent city 
population need lack the means and op- 
portunities of frequent out-of-door enjoy- 
ment. Our climate is indeed rough and 
changeable, but, on the whole, produces 
scenes of much more various beauty than 
any monotonous climate, while against the 
occasional severity of our weather artificial 
protection is more and more provided. 
What we may wisely ask of our tailors and 
our landscape architects is protection in the 
open air from the extremes of heat, cold, 
and wind. The provision of an equable 
climate indoors is by no means sufficient 
to secure either the health or the happiness 
of the people. 

[29] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 



FAMILY LOVE 



From the love of nature we turn to 
family love. The domestic affections are 
the principal source of human happiness 
and well-being. The mutual loves of hus- 
band and wife, of parents and children, of 
brothers and sisters, are not only the 
chief sources of happiness, but the chief 
springs of action, and the chief safeguards 
from evil. The young man and the 
young woman work and save in order that 
they may be married and have a home of 
their own ; once married, they work and 
save that they may bring up well a family. 
The supreme object of the struggling and 
striving of most men is the family. One 
might almost say that the security and 
elevation of the family and of family life 
are the prime objects of civilization, and 
the ultimate ends of all industry and trade. 
In respect to this principal source of hap- 
piness, the young mechanic, operative, 
clerk, or laborer is generally better off than 
the young professional man, inasmuch as 

[30] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

he can marry earlier. He goes from the 
parental roof to his own roof with only 
a short interval, if any, between. The 
working-man is often a grandfather before 
he is fifty years old ; the professional 
man but seldom. Love before marriage, 
being the most attractive theme of poetry 
and fiction, gets a very disproportionate 
amount of attention in literature, as com- 
pared with the domestic affections after 
marriage. 

Concerning these normal domestic joys, 
any discerning person who has experienced 
them, and has been intimate with four or 
five generations, will be likely to make 
three observations : In the first place, the 
realization of the natural and legitimate 
enjoyments in domestic life depends on 
the possession of physical and moral 
health. Whatever impairs bodily vigor, 
animal spirits, and good temper lessens the 
chance of attaining the natural domestic 
joys, — joys which by themselves, without 
any additions whatever except food and 
steady work, make earthly life worth living. 
In the second place, they endure, and in- 

[31 ] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

crease with lapse of years ; the satisfactions 
of normal married life do not decline, but 
mount. Children are more and more in- 
teresting as they grow older ; at all stages, 
from babyhood to manhood and woman- 
hood, they are to be daily enjoyed. Peo- 
ple who think they shall enjoy their 
children to-morrow, or year after next, will 
never enjoy them. The greatest pleasure 
in them comes late ; for, as Hamerton 
mentions in his " Human Intercourse," the 
most exquisite satisfaction of the parent is to 
come to respect and admire the powers and 
character of the child. Thirdly, the family 
affections and joys are the ultimate source 
of civilized man's idea of a loving God, — 
an idea which is a deep root of happiness 
when it becomes an abiding conviction. 
They have supplied all the conceptions of 
which this idea is the supreme essence, 
or infinite product. It deserves mention 
here that these supreme enjoyments of the 
normal, natural life — the domestic joys — 
are woman's more than man's ; because his 
function of bread-winning necessarily sepa- 
rates him from his home during a good 

[32] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

part of his time, particularly since domes- 
tic or house industries have been super- 
seded by factory methods. 

PLEASURE IN BODILY EXERTION 

I turn now to the satisfaction which 
comes from physical exertion, including 
brain-work. Everybody knows some form 
of activity which gives him satisfaction. 
Perhaps it is riding a horse, or rowing a 
boat, or tramping all day through woods or 
along beaches with a gun on the shoulder, 
or climbing a mountain, or massing into a 
ball or bloom a paste of sticky iron in a 
puddling furnace (that heaviest of la- 
bor), or wrestling with the handles of the 
plunging, staggering plough, or tugging at 
a boat's tiller when the breeze is fresh, or 
getting in hay before the shower. There 
is real pleasure and exhilaration in bodily 
exertion, particularly with companionship 
(of men or animals) and competition. There 
is pleasure in the exertion even when it is 
pushed to the point of fatigue, as many a 
sportsman knows ; and this pleasure is in 
3 [ 33 1 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

good measure independent of the attain- 
ment of any practical end. There is 
pleasure in mere struggle, so it be not hope- 
less, and in overcoming resistance, obsta- 
cles, and hardships. When to the pleasure 
of exertion is added the satisfaction of pro- 
ducing a new value, and the further satis- 
faction of earning a livelihood through that 
new value, we have the common pleasur- 
able conditions of productive labor. Every 
working-man who is worth his salt (I care 
not whether he works with his hands and 
brains, or with his brains alone) takes 
satisfaction, first, in the working, secondly, 
in the product of his work, and, thirdly, 
in what that product yields to him. The 
carpenter who takes no pleasure in the 
mantel he has made, the farm laborer who 
does not care for the crops he has culti- 
vated, the weaver who takes no pride in 
the cloth he has woven, the engineer who 
takes no interest in the working of the 
engine he directs, is a monstrosity. It is 
an objection to many forms of intellectual 
labor that their immediate product is in- 
tangible and often imperceptible. The 

[34] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

fruit of mental labor is often diffused, re- 
mote, or subtile. It eludes measurement, 
and even observation. On the other 
hand, mental labor is more enjoyable than 
manual labor in the process. The essence 
of the joy lies in the doing rather than in 
the result of the doing. There is a life- 
long and solid satisfaction in any productive 
labor, manual or mental, which is not 
pushed beyond the limit of strength. The 
difference between the various occupations 
of men in respect to yielding this satis- 
faction is much less than people suppose ; 
for occupations become habitual in time, 
and the daily work in every calling gets to 
be so familiar that it may fairly be called 
monotonous. My occupation, for instance, 
offers, I believe, more variety than that of 
most professional men ; yet I should say 
that nine-tenths of my work, from day to 
day, was routine work, presenting no more 
novelty or fresh interest to me than the 
work of a carpenter or blacksmith, who is 
always making new things on old types, 
presents to him. The Oriental, hot- 
climate figment that labor is a curse is 

[35] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

contradicted by the experience of all the 
progressive nations. The Teutonic stock 
owes everything that is great and inspiring 
in its destiny to its faculty of overcoming 
difficulties by hard work, and of taking 
heartfelt satisfaction in this victorious work. 
It is not the dawdlers and triflerswho find 
life worth living ; it is the steady, strenu- 
ous, robust workers. 

THE PLEASURE OF READING 

Once when I was talking with Dr. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes about the best 
pleasures in life, he mentioned, as one of 
the most precious, frequent contact with 
quick and well-stored minds in large 
variety ; he valued highly the number, 
frequency, and variety of quickening in- 
tellectual encounters. We were thinking 
of contact in conversation ; but this pleas- 
ure, if only to be procured by personal 
meetings, would obviously be within the 
reach, as a rule, of only a very limited 
number of persons. Fortunately for us 
and for posterity, the cheap printing-press 

[36] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

has put within easy reach of every man 
who can read all the best minds both of 
the past and the present. For one-tenth 
part of a year's wages a young mechanic 
can buy, before he marries, a library of 
famous books which, if he masters it, will 
make him a well-read man. For half-a- 
day's wages a clerk can provide himself 
with a weekly paper which will keep 
him informed for a year of all impor- 
tant current events. Public libraries, cir- 
culating libraries, Sunday-school libraries, 
and book-clubs nowadays bring much 
reading to the door of every household 
and every solitary creature that wants to 
read. This is a new privilege for the mass 
of mankind ; and it is an inexhaustible 
source of intellectual and spiritual nutri- 
ment. It seems as if this new privilege 
alone must alter the whole aspect of society 
in a few generations. Books are the quiet- 
est and most constant of friends; they are the 
most accessible and wisest of counsellors, 
and the most patient of teachers. With 
his daily work and his books, many a man 
whom the world thought forlorn has found 

[37] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

life worth living. It is a mistake to sup- 
pose that a great deal of leisure is neces- 
sary for this happy intercourse with books. 
Ten minutes a day devoted affectionately to 
good books — indeed to one book of the 
first order like the English Bible or Shake- 
speare, or to two or three books of the 
second order like Homer, Virgil, Milton, 
or Bacon — will in thirty years make all 
the difference between a cultivated and an 
uncultivated man, between a man mentally 
rich and a man mentally poor. The 
pleasures of reading are, of course, in good 
part pleasures of the imagination ; but they 
are just as natural and actual as pleasures 
of the sense, and are often more accessible 
and more lasting. 

MUTUAL SERVICE AND CO-OPERATION 

In the next place I ask your attention 
to the fact that man is a part of outward 
nature, and that the men and women among 
whom our lot is cast are an important part 
of our actual environment. In some rela- 
tion or other to these human beings we 

[38] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

perforce must stand. The question in 
what relation we had better stand to them 
is a practical, this-world question, and not 
a sentimental or next-world question. 
Further, our sympathetic feelings, over 
which we have hardly more control than 
we have over the beating of our hearts, go 
out to our fellow-men more and more 
widely, as better means of communication 
bring home to us the joys and sorrows of 
widespread multitudes. In what relation 
is it for our satisfaction to stand in this 
world toward our fellow-men ? Shall we 
love or hate them, bless or curse them, 
help or hinder them ? These are not 
theoretical questions which arise out of 
religious speculation or some abstract phi- 
losophy. They are earthly, every-day, 
concrete questions, as intensely practical 
as the question how are we to get our 
daily bread, or where are we to find shelter 
from the snowstorm. Human beings are 
all about us ; we and they are mutually 
dependent in ways so complex and intri- 
cate that no wisdom can unravel them. It 
is in vain for us or them to say, Let us 

[39] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

alone ; for that is a downright impossibil- 
ity. To the question, How do reasonable 
men under these circumstances naturally 
and inevitably incline to act toward their 
fellow-beings ? there is but one common- 
sense, matter-of-fact answer, namely, they 
incline to serve and co-operate with them. 
That civilized society exists at all is a 
demonstration that this inclination in the 
main governs human relations. Every 
great city is dependent for food, drink, and 
fuel on a few bridges, dams, canals, or 
aqueducts which a dozen intelligent human 
devils, armed with suitable explosives and 
fire-bombs, could destroy in a night. If 
the doctrine of total depravity were any- 
thing but the invention of a morbid human 
imagination, the massing of people by 
hundreds of thousands would be too dan- 
gerous to be attempted. Civilized society 
assumes that the great majority of men 
will combine to procure advantages, resist 
evils, defend rights, and remedy wrongs. 
Following this general and inevitable in- 
clination, the individual finds that by serv- 
ing others he best serves himself; because 

[403 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

he thus conforms to the promptings of his 
own and their best nature. The most 
satisfactory thing in all this earthly life is 
to be able to serve our fellow-beings, — 
first those who are bound to us by ties of 
love, then the wider circle of fellow- 
townsmen, fellow-countrymen, or fellow- 
men. To be of service is a solid foundation 
for contentment in this world. For our 
present purpose it does not matter where 
we got these ideas about our own better 
nature and its best satisfaction ; it is 
enough that our generation, as a matter 
of fact, has these ideas, and is ruled by 
them. 

The amount of the service is no meas- 
ure of the satisfaction or happiness which 
he who renders the service derives from it. 
One man founds an academy or a hospital ; 
another sends one boy to be educated at 
the academy, or one sick man to be treated 
at the hospital. The second is the smaller 
service, but may yield the greater satisfac- 
tion. Sir Samuel Romilly attacked the 
monstrous English laws which affixed the 
death penalty to a large number of petty 

[ 4i ] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

offences against property, like poaching, 
sheep-stealing, and pocket-picking. In the 
dawn of a February morning, when the 
wind was blowing a gale and the ther- 
mometer was below zero, Captain Smith, 
of the Cuttyhunk Lighthouse, took three 
men off a wreck which the heavy sea was 
fast pounding to pieces on a reef close be- 
low the light. Sir Samuel Romilly's labors 
ultimately did an amount of good quite 
beyond computation ; but he lived to see 
accomplished only a small part of the be- 
neficent changes he had advocated. The 
chances are that Captain Smith got more 
satisfaction for the rest of his life out of that 
rescue, done in an hour, than Sir Samuel 
out of his years of labor for a much-needed 
reform in the English penal code. There 
was another person who took satisfaction 
in that rescue ever after, and was entitled 
to. When day dawned on that wintry 
morning, Captain Smith's wife, who had 
been listening restlessly to the roar of the 
sea and the wind, could lie still no longer. 
She got up and looked out of the window. 
To her horror there was a small schooner 

[42 ] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

on the reef in plain sight, one mast fallen 
over the side, and three men lashed to the 
other mast. Her husband was still fast 
asleep. Must she rouse him ? If she 
did, she knew he would go out there into 
that furious sea and freezing wind. If she 
waited only a little while, the men would 
be dead, and it would be of no use to 
go. Should she speak to him ? She did. 
Oh, it is not the amount of good done 
which measures the love or heroism which 
prompted the serviceable deed, or the 
happiness which the doer gets from it ! 
It is the spirit of service which creates 
both the merit and the satisfaction. 

One of the purest and most enduring 
of human pleasures is to be found in the 
possession of a good name among one's 
neighbors and acquaintances. As Shake- 
speare puts it : 

w The purest treasure mortal times afford 
Is spotless reputation. " 

This is not fame, or even distinction ; it is 
local reputation among the few scores or 
hundreds of persons who really know one. 

[43] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

It is a satisfaction quite of this world, and 
one attained by large numbers of quiet 
men and women whose names are never 
mentioned beyond the limits of their re- 
spective sets of acquaintance. Such repu- 
tation regards, not mental power or manual 
skill, but character ; it is slowly built upon 
purity, integrity, courage, and sincerity. 
To possess it is a crowning satisfaction 
which is oftenest experienced to the full 
rather late in life, when some other pleas- 
ures begin to fade away. 

THE SELECTION OF BELIEFS 

Lastly, I shall venture to call your 
attention to the importance — with a view 
to a happy life — of making a judicious 
selection of beliefs. Here we are living 
on a little islet of sense and fact in the 
midst of a boundless ocean of the un- 
known and mysterious. From year to 
year and century to century the islet ex- 
pands, as new districts are successively 
lifted from out the encompassing sea of 
ignorance; but it still remains encircled 

[44] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

by this prodigious sea. In this state of 
things every inquisitive, truth-seeking hu- 
man being is solicited by innumerable be- 
liefs, old and new. The past generations, 
out of which we spring, have been believing 
many undemonstrated and undemonstrable 
things ; and we inherit their beliefs. Every 
year new beliefs appeal to us for accept- 
ance, some of them clashing with the old. 
Everybody holds numerous beliefs on 
subjects outside the realm of knowledge ; 
and, moreover, everybody has to act on 
these beliefs from hour to hour. All men 
of science walk by faith and not by sight 
in exploring and experimenting, the pecu- 
liarity of their walk being that they gener- 
ally take but one step at a time, and that 
a short one. All business proceeds on 
beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and 
not on certainties. The very essence of 
heroism is that it takes adverse chances ; 
so that full foreknowledge of the issue 
would subtract from the heroic quality. 
Beliefs, then, we must have and must act 
on ; and they are sure to affect profoundly 
our happiness in this world. How to 

[45] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

treat our old beliefs and choose our new 
ones, with a view to happiness, is in these 
days a serious problem for every reflective 
person. 

The first steps toward making a calm 
choice are to observe strictly the line of 
demarcation between facts on the one hand 
and beliefs on the other, and to hold facts 
as facts and beliefs as nothing more than 
beliefs. Next we need a criterion or touch- 
stone for beliefs old and new. The sur- 
est touchstone is the ethical standard which 
through inheritance, education, and the 
experience of daily life has, as a matter of 
fact, become our standard. It is not for 
our happiness to believe any proposition 
about the nature of man, the universe, or 
God, which is really at war with our funda- 
mental instincts of honor and justice, or 
with our ideals of gentleness and love, no 
matter how those instincts and ideals have 
been implanted or arrived at. The man 
or woman who hopes to attain reflective 
happiness, as he works his strenuous way 
through the world, must bring all beliefs, 
old and new, to this critical test, and must 

[46 ] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

reject, or refuse to entertain, beliefs which 
do not stand the test. 

One obvious fact of observation seems 
to contradict this correlation of beliefs with 
ethical content and, therefore, with happi- 
ness. Millions of comfortable men and 
women do, as a matter of fact, believe 
various long-transmitted doctrines which 
are clearly repulsive to the moral sense of 
the entire present generation. How can 
this be? Simply because these millions 
accept also antidotal doctrines which neu- 
tralize the natural effect of the first 
beliefs. This process may persist for 
generations without affecting much the 
happiness of mankind, but nevertheless 
it has its dangers; for if faith in the 
antidotes be lost first, a moral chaos may 
set in. 

Sudden and solitary changes of belief 
are seldom happy. A gentle, gradual 
transformation of beliefs, in company with 
kindred, neighbors, and friends, is the 
happiest. Men have always been gregari- 
ous in beliefs ; if they cannot remain with 
their own herd, it will be for their happi- 

[47 1 



THE HAPPY* LIFE 

ness to join a more congenial herd as 
quickly as possible. 

Of the two would-be despots in beliefs 

— the despot who authoritatively com- 
mands men to believe as he says, and the 
despot who forbids men to believe at all 

— the first is the more tolerable to the 
immense majority of mankind. Under 
the first despot millions of people have 
lived, and now live, in contented faith ; 
but nobody can live happily under the 
other. To curious, truth-seeking, pioneer- 
ing minds one seems as bad as the other, 
and neither in any way endurable. 

A certain deliberation in accepting new 
beliefs is conducive to happiness, particu- 
larly if the new ideas are destructive rather 
than constructive. Emerson recommends 
us, as a measure of intellectual economy, 
not to read a book until it is at least one 
year old — so many books disappear in a 
year. In like manner, of novel specu- 
lative opinions all but the best built and 
most buoyant will go under within ten 
years of their launching. 

We may be sure that cheerful beliefs 
[ 48 ] . 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

about the unseen world; framed in full 
harmony with the beauty of the visible 
universe and with the sweetness of the 
domestic affections and joys, and held in 
company with kindred and friends, will 
illuminate the dark places on the pathway 
of earthly life, and brighten all the road. 

THE CONFLICT WITH EVIL 

Having thus surveyed the various joys 
and satisfactions which may make civilized 
life happy for multitudes upon multitudes 
of our race, I hasten to admit that there 
are physical and moral evils in this world 
which impair or interrupt earthly happi- 
ness. The worst of the physical evils are 
lingering diseases and untimely deaths. I 
admit, too, that not a few men do, as a 
matter of fact, lead lives not worth living. 
I admit, also, that there are dreadful, as well 
as pleasing, sights and sounds in this world, 
and that many seemingly cruel catastrophes 
and destructions mark the course of nature. 
Biological science has lately impressed 
many people with the prevalence of cruelty 

4 [ 49 ] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

and mutual destruction in the animal and 
vegetable world. From man down, the 
creatures live by preying on each other. 
Insidious parasites infest all kinds of plants 
and animals. Every living thing seems to 
have its mortal foe. The very ants go to 
war, for all the world like men, and Venus's 
flytrap (Dionaea) is as cruel as a spider. 
So human society is riddled with mischiefs 
and wrongs, some, like Armenian mas- 
sacres, due to surviving savagery, and 
some, like slums, to sickly civilization. It 
would seem impossible to wring satisfaction 
and thoughtful happiness from such evils ; 
yet that is just what men of noble natures 
are constantly doing. They fight evil, and 
from the contest win content and even joy. 
Nobody has any right to find life uninter- 
esting or unrewarding who sees within the 
sphere of his own activity a wrong he can 
help to remedy, or within himself an evil 
he can hope to overcome. It should be 
observed that the inanimate creation does 
not lend itself, like the animate creation, 
to the theory that for every good in nature 
there is an equivalent evil, and for every 

[503 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

i 

beautiful thing an ugly offset. There is no 
offset to the splendor of the heavens by 
night or to the glories of the sunset, no 
drawback on the beauty of perfect form 
and various hue in crystalline minerals, 
and no evil counterbalancing the serenity 
of the mountains or the sublimity of the 
ocean. 

Again, the existence of evils and mys- 
teries must not blind us to the abounding 
and intelligible good. We must remem- 
ber that the misfortunes hardest to bear 
are those which never come, as Lowell 
said. We must clear our minds, so far as 
possible, of cruel imaginings about the in- 
visible world and its rulers ; and, on the 
other hand, we must never allow imagined 
consolations, or compensatory delights, in 
some other world to reconcile us to the 
endurance of resistible evils in this. We 
must never distress ourselves because we 
cannot fully understand the moral princi- 
ples on which the universe is conducted. 
It would be vastly more reasonable in an 
ant to expect to understand the constitu- 
tion of the sun. 

[51] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 



We must be sure to give due weight in 
our minds to the good side of every event 
which has two sides. A fierce northeaster 
drives some vessels out of their course and 
others upon the ruthless rocks. Property 
and life are lost. But that same storm 
watered the crops upon ten thousand 
farms, or filled the springs which later will 
yield to millions of men and animals their 
necessary drink. A tiger springs upon an 
antelope, picks out the daintiest bits from 
the carcass, and leaves the rest to the 
jackals. We say, Poor little antelope ! 
We forget to say, Happy tiger ! Fortu- 
nate jackals ! who were seeking their meat 
from God, and found it. A house which 
stands in open ground must have a sunny 
side as well as a shady. Be sure to live 
on the sunny side, and even then do not 
expect the world to look bright if you 
habitually wear gray-brown glasses. 

We must assiduously cultivate a just 
sense of the proportion between right and 
wrong, good and evil, in this world. The 
modern newspaper press is a serious ob- 
stacle to habitual cheerfulness, because it 

[52] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

draws constant attention to abnormal evils 
and crimes, and makes no account of the 
normal successes, joys, and well-doings. 
We read in the morning paper that five 
houses, two barns, three shops, and a fac- 
tory have burned up in the night; and 
we do not say to ourselves that within 
the same territory five hundred thousand 
houses, three hundred thousand barns, as 
many shops, and a thousand factories have 
stood in safety. We observe that ten per- 
sons have been injured on railways within 
twenty-four hours, and we forget that two 
million have travelled in safety. Out of 
every thousand persons in the city of 
Cambridge twenty die in the course of a 
year, but the other nine hundred ,and 
eighty live ; and of the twenty who die 
some have filled out the natural span of 
life, and others are obviously unfit to live. 
Sometimes our individual lives seem to be 
full of troubles and miseries — our own or 
those of others. Then we must fall back 
on this abiding sense of the real propor- 
tion between the lives sorrowful and the 
lives glad at any one moment ; and of the 

[53] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

preponderance of gain over loss, health 
over sickness, joy over sorrow, good over 
evil, and life over death. 



CONCLUSION 

I shall not have succeeded in treating 
my subject clearly if I have not convinced 
you that earthly happiness is not dependent 
on the amount of one's possessions or the 
nature of one's employment. The enjoy- 
ments and satisfactions I have described 
are accessible to poor and rich, to humble 
and high alike, if only they cultivate 
the physical, mental, and moral faculties 
through which the natural joys are won. 
Any man may win them who by his daily 
labor can earn a wholesome living for him- 
self and his family. I have not mentioned 
a single pleasure which involves unusual 
expense, or the possession of any uncom- 
mon mental gifts. It follows that the 
happiness of the entire community is to be 
most surely promoted, not by increasing 
its total wealth, or even by distributing 
that wealth more evenly, but by improv- 

[54 ] 



THE HAPPY LIFE 

ing its physical and moral health. A 
poorer population may easily be happier 
than a richer, if it be of sounder health 
and morality. 

In conclusion, let me ask you to con- 
sider whether the rational conduct of life 
on the this-world principles here laid down 
would differ in any important respect from 
the right conduct of life on the principles 
of the Christian gospels. It does not seem 
to me that it would. 



[553 



JOHN GILLEY 

MAINE FARMER 
AND FISHERMAN 



JOHN GILLEY 1 

TO be absolutely forgotten in a few 
years is the common fate of man- 
kind. Isaac Watts did not exaggerate 
when he wrote : 

"Time, like an ever-rolling stream, 
Bears all its sons away : 
They fly forgotten, as a dream 
Dies at the opening day." 

With the rarest exceptions, the death 
of each human individual is followed in 
a short time by complete oblivion, so 
far as living human memories are con- 
cerned. Even family recollection or tradi- 
tion quickly becomes dim, and soon fades 
utterly away. Few of us have any clear 
transmitted impression of our great-grand- 
parents ; some of us could not describe 
our grandparents. Even men accounted 

1 Copyright, 1899, by The Century Company. 

[59] 



JOHN GILLEY 

famous at their deaths slip from living 
memories and become mere shadows or 
word-pictures — shadows or pictures which 
too often distort or misrepresent the origi- 
nals. Not one human being in ten million 
is really long remembered. For the mass 
of mankind absolute oblivion, like death, 
is sure. But what if it is ? Should 
this indubitable fact affect injuriously the 
mortal life in this world of the ordinary 
human being? Not at all. For most 
men and women the enjoyments, interests, 
and duties of this world are just as real 
and absorbing, at the moment, as they 
would be if the enjoying, interested, and 
dutiful individuals could imagine that they 
were long to be remembered on this earthly 
stage. A few unusually imaginative and 
ambitious persons are doubtless stimulated 
and supported by the hope of undying 
fame — a hope which in the immense ma- 
jority of such cases proves to be a pure 
delusion. The fact is that forelooking is 
not a common occupation of the human 
mind. We all live, as a rule, in the pres- 
ent and the past, and take very little 

[60 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

thought for the future. Now, in estimat- 
ing the aggregate well-being and happiness 
of a community or a nation, it is obviously 
the condition of the obscure millions, who 
are sure to be absolutely forgotten, that it 
is most important to Isee and weigh aright ; 
yet history and biography alike neglect 
these humble, speechless multitudes, and 
modern fiction finds it profitable to portray 
the most squalid and vicious sides of the 
life of these millions rather than the best 
and the commonest. Thus the facts about 
the life of the common multitude go un- 
observed, or at least unrecorded, while 
fiction paints that life in false colors. 

This little book describes with accuracy 
the actual life of one of the to-be-forgotten 
millions. Is this life a true American 
type ? If it is, there is good hope for our 
country. 

John Gilley was born February 22, 
1822, at the Fish Point on Great Cran- 
berry Island, Maine, whither his mother, 
who lived on Baker's Island, had gone to 
be confined at the house of Mrs. Stanley, 
a midwife. Baker's Island lies nearly four 

[61 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

miles from the island of Mount Desert. 
It is a roundish island, a little more than 
half a mile long from north to south, and 
a little less than half a mile wide from east 
to west. At low tide it is connected with 
another much larger island, called Little 
Cranberry, by a reef and bar about a mile 
long ; but by half-tide this bar is entirely 
covered. Almost all the coasting vessels 
which come from the westward, bound to 
the Bay of Fundy or to the coast of Maine 
east of Frenchman's Bay, pass just outside 
of Baker's Island ; and, as this island has 
some dangerous ledges near it, the United 
States built a lighthouse on its highest part 
in the year 1828. The island has no good 
harbor; but in the summer small vessels 
find a safe anchorage on the north side of 
it, except in easterly storms. The whole 
shore of the island is bare rock, and the 
vegetation does not approach the ordi- 
nary level of high water, the storm-waves 
keeping the rocks bare far above and be- 
hind the smooth-water level of high tide. 
There are many days in every year when 
it is impossible to land on the island or to 

[6 2 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

launch a boat from it. In the milder half 
of the year the island is of course a con- 
venient stopping-place for offshore fisher- 
men, for it is several miles nearer the 
fishing-grounds than the harbors of Mount 
Desert proper. In the first years of this 
century the island was uninhabited, and 
was covered by a growth of good-sized 
trees, both evergreen and deciduous. 

About the year 1812, William Gilley of 
Norwood's Cove, at the foot of Somes 
Sound on its west side, and Hannah 
Lurvey, his wife, decided to move on to 
Baker's Island with their three little chil- 
dren and all their goods. Up to that time 
he had got his living chiefly on fishing or 
coasting vessels ; but, like most young men 
of the region, he was also something of a 
wood-cutter and farmer. He and his wife 
had already accumulated a little store of 
household goods and implements, and tools 
for fishing and farming. They needed no 
money wherewith to buy Baker's Island. 
There it lay in the sea, unoccupied and 
unclaimed ; and they simply took posses- 
sion of it. 

[63] 



JOHN GILLEY 

William Gilley was a large, strong man, 
six feet tall, and weighing over two hun- 
dred pounds. His father is said to have 
come from Great Britain at fourteen years 
of age. Hannah Gilley was a robust wo- 
man, who had lived in Newburyport and 
Byfield, Massachusetts, until she was 
thirteen years old, and had there had much 
better schooling than was to be had on the 
island of Mount Desert. She was able to 
teach all her children to read, write, and 
cipher ; and all her life she valued good 
reading, and encouraged it in her family. 
Her father, Jacob Lurvey, was born in 
Gloucester, Massachusetts, and married 
Hannah Boynton of Byfield. The name 
Lurvey is a good transliteration of the 
German Loewe, which is a common name 
among German Jews ; and there is a tra- 
dition in the Lurvey family that the first 
Lurvey, who emigrated to Massachusetts 
in the seventeenth century, was of Jewish 
descent and came from Archangel in 
Russia. It is noticeable that many of the 
Lurveys have Old Testament names, such 
as Reuben, Levi, Samuel, Isaac, and Jacob, 

[ 64] 



JOHN GILLEY 

and that their noses tend to be aquiline. 
This was the case with most of the children 
of William and Hannah Gilley. The father 
of Hannah served in the Revolutionary 
army as a boy. He lived to the age of 
ninety-two, and had ten children and 
seventy-seven grandchildren. The Lur- 
veys are therefore still numerous at South- 
West Harbor and the vicinity. 

For William Gilley the enterprise of 
taking possession of Baker's Island in- 
volved much heavy labor, but few unac- 
customed risks. For Hannah, his wife, 
it was different. She already had three 
little children, and she was going to face 
for herself and her family a formidable 
isolation which was absolute for consider- 
able periods in the year. Moreover, she 
was going to take her share in the severe 
labors of a pioneering family. Even to 
get a footing on this wooded island — to 
land lumber, live stock, provisions, and 
the implements of labor, and to build the 
first shelter — was no easy task. A small, 
rough beach of large stones was the only 
landing-place, and just above the bare 
5 [6 5 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

rocks of the shore was the forest. How- 
ever, health, strength, and fortitude were 
theirs ; and in a few years they had estab- 
lished themselves on the island in consid- 
erable comfort. Nine more children were 
born to them there ; so that they ulti- 
mately had a family of twelve children, of 
whom six were sons and six daughters. All 
these children grew to maturity. Fortu- 
nately, the eldest child was a girl, for it 
was the mother that most needed help. 
Three of the children are still (1899) liv- 
ing, two of them over eighty years of age 
and one over ninety. Nine of the twelve 
children married, and to them were born 
fifty-eight children, of whom forty-five are 
still living. 

John Gilley was the tenth child and 
also the youngest son, and when he was 
born the family had already been ten years 
on the island, and had transformed it into 
a tolerable farm. When he began to look 
about him, his father was keeping about 
six cows, a yoke of oxen, two or three 
young cattle, about fifty sheep, and three 
or four hogs. Several of the children 

[66] 



JOHN GILLEY 

were already contributing by their labor to 
the support of the family. The girls, by 
the time they were twelve years old, were 
real helpers for the mother. They tended 
the poultry, made butter, and spun wool. 
The boys naturally helped in the work of 
the father. He, unaided except by his 
boys, had cleared a considerable portion 
of the island, burning up in so doing a 
fine growth of trees — spruce, fir, birch, 
and beech. With his oxen he had broken 
up the cleared land, hauled off part of the 
stones and piled them on the protruding 
ledges, and gradually made fields for grass 
and other crops. In the earlier years, 
before flour began to be cheap at the 
Mount Desert " stores," he had even 
raised a little wheat on the island ; but the 
main crops besides hay were potatoes and 
other vegetables for the use of the family 
and cattle. The son is still living who 
carried a boat-load of wheat to Somes- 
ville, had it ground and sifted into three 
grades, and carried all three back to the 
island for winter use. The potato-bug 
and potato-rot were then unknown, and 

[6 7 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

the island yielded any wished-for amount 
of potatoes. The family often dug from 
two to three hundred bushels of potatoes 
in a season, and fed what they did not 
want to their cattle and hogs. 

Food at the island was habitually abun- 
dant. It was no trouble to get lobsters. 
No traps were needed ; they could be 
picked up in the shallow water along the 
rocky shore. Fresh fish were always to be 
easily procured, except in stormy weather 
and in cold and windy February and 
March. A lamb could be killed at any 
time in the summer. In the fall, in sort- 
ing the flock of sheep, the family killed 
from ten to fifteen sheep ; and what they 
could not use as fresh mutton they salted. 
Later in the season, when the weather 
turned cold, they killed a " beef-critter," 
and sometimes two when the family grew 
large. Part of this beef was salted, but 
part was kept frozen throughout the winter 
to be used fresh. Sea-birds added to their 
store of food. Shooting them made sport 
for the boys. Ducks and other sea-fowl 
were so abundant in the fall that the gunners 

[ 68 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

had to throw away the bodies of the birds, 
after picking off all the feathers. The fam- 
ily never bought any salt pork, but every 
winter made a year's supply. Although 
codfish were easily accessible, the family 
made no use of salt cod. They preferred 
mackerel, which were to be taken in the 
near waters in some month of every year. 
They had a few nets, but they also caught 
mackerel on the hook. During the sum- 
mer and early autumn the family had 
plenty of fresh vegetables. 

For clothing the family depended mostly 
on wool from their own sheep. They 
used very little cotton. There were spin- 
ning-wheels and looms in the house, and 
the mother both spun and wove. Flax 
they raised on the island, and from it made 
a coarse kind of linen, chiefly for towels. 
They did, however, buy a cotton warp, 
and filled it with wool, thus making a 
comfortable sort of sheet for winter use or 
light blanket for summer. The wool of 
at least fifty sheep was used every year in 
the household, when the family had grown 
large. The children all went barefoot the 

[6 9 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

greater part of the year ; but in the win- 
ter they wore shoes or boots, the eldest 
brother having learned enough of the 
shoemaker's art to keep the family sup- 
plied with footwear in winter. At that 
time there were no such things as rubber 
boots, and the family did not expect to 
have dry feet. 

Their uses for money were few ; but 
some essentials to comfort they must pro- 
cure at the store, seven miles away, at 
South-West Harbor, in return for money 
or its equivalent. Their available re- 
sources for procuring money were very 
much like those of similar families to-day 
in the same neighborhood. They could 
sell or exchange butter and eggs at the 
store, and they could sell in Boston dried 
fish and feathers. One of John's elder 
brothers shot birds enough in a single year 
to yield over a hundredweight of feathers, 
worth fifty cents a pound in Boston. The 
family shipped their feathers to Boston 
every year by a coasting vessel ; and this 
product represented men's labor, whereas 
the butter and eggs represented chiefly the 

[ 7o] 



JOHN GILLEY 

women's labor. The butter was far the best 
of the cash resources ; and so it remains to 
this day in these islands. It sold in the 
vicinity at twelve and a half cents a pound. 
There was one other source of money, 
namely, smoked herring. The herring 
which abound in these waters had at that 
time no value for bait; but smoked her- 
ring could be sold in New York, which 
was the best market for them, at from 
seventy-five cents to one dollar and ten 
cents a box, each box holding half a 
bushel. The herring were caught, for 
the most part, in gill-nets ; for there were 
then no weirs and no seines. The family 
had their own smoke-house, and made the 
boxes themselves from lumber which was 
sawed for them at the Somesville or the 
Duck Brook saw-mill. Each of these 
saw-mills was at least nine miles distant 
from Baker's Island ; so that it was a 
serious undertaking, requiring favorable 
weather, to boat the lumber from the mill 
and land it safely at the rough home beach. 
The family nailed the boxes together, out 
of the sawed lumber in the early fall, 

[71 1 



JOHN GILLEY 

and packed them with the fragrant fish ; 
and then some coasting vessel, usually a 
schooner owned in a neighboring island, 
carried the finished product to distant 
New York, and brought back, after a 
month or two, clear cash to pay for the 
winter's stores. 

In this large and united family the boys 
stayed at home and worked for their par- 
ents until they were twenty-one years of 
age, and the girls stayed at home until 
they were married and had homes of their 
own or had come of age. All the boys 
and three of the girls were ultimately 
married. The three girls who did not 
marry went away from home to earn 
money by household labor, factory work, 
nursing, or sewing. It was not all work 
for the children on the island, or, indeed, 
for the father and mother. In the long 
winter evenings they played checkers and 
fox and geese ; and the mother read to the 
family until the children grew old enough 
to take their share in reading aloud. Out 
of doors they played ball, and in winter 
coasted on the snow. The boys, as soon 

[72] 



JOHN GILLEY 

as they were ten or twelve years of age, 
were in and out of boats much of the time, 
and so attained that quick, instinctive use 
of oar, sail, and tiller in which lies safety. 
When they grew older they had the sport 
of gunning, with the added interest of 
profit from the feathers. Their domestic 
animals were a great interest as well as a 
great care. Then, they always had before 
them some of the most splendid aspects 
of nature. From their sea-girt dwelling 
they could see the entire hemisphere of 
the sky ; and to the north lay the grand 
hills of Mount Desert, with outline clear 
and sharp when the northwest wind blew, 
but dim and soft when southerly winds 
prevailed. In every storm a magnificent 
surf dashed up on the rockbound isle. In 
winter the low sun made the sea toward 
the south a sheet of shimmering silver ; 
and all the year an endless variety of col- 
ors, shades, and textures played over the 
surfaces of hills and sea. The delight in 
such visions is often but half conscious in 
persons who have not the habit of reflec- 
tion ; but it is nevertheless a real source 

[73] 



JOHN GILLEY 

of happiness, which is soon missed when 
one brought up amid such pure and 
noble scenes is set down among the strait- 
ened, squalid, ugly sights of a city. On 
the whole, the survivors of that isolated 
family look back on their childhood as a 
happy one ; and they feel a strong sense 
of obligation to the father and mother — 
particularly to the mother, because she 
was a person of excellent faculties and an 
intellectual outlook. Like most of her 
people for two generations, she was a 
member of the Congregational Church ; 
and in the summer-time she took the eld- 
est children nearly every Sunday in mild 
weather to the church at South-West 
Harbor, going seven miles each way in 
an open boat. To be sure, the minister 
taught that hell was paved with infants' 
skulls, and descriptions of hell-fire and 
the undying worm formed an important 
part of every discourse. Some of the 
children supposed themselves to accept 
what they heard at church ; but the mother 
did not. She bought books and read for 
herself; and by the time she had borne 

[74] 



JOHN GILLEY 

half a dozen children she could no longer 
accept the old beliefs, and became a Uni- 
versalis^ to which more cheerful faith she 
adhered till her death. 

It is obvious that this family on its 
island domain was much more self-con- 
tained and independent than any ordinary 
family is to-day, even under similar cir- 
cumstances. They got their fuel, food, 
and clothing as products of their own skill 
and labor, their supplies and resources 
being almost all derived from the sea and 
from their own fields and woods. In 
these days of one crop on a farm, one 
trade for a man, and factory labor for 
whole families, it is not probable that there 
exists a single American family which is 
so little dependent on exchange of prod- 
ucts, or on supplies resulting from the la- 
bor of others, as was the family of William 
and Hannah Gilley from 1812 to 1842. 
It should also be observed that sea-shore 
people have a considerable advantage in 
bringing up boys, because boys who be- 
come good boatmen must have had an 
admirable training in alertness, prompt 

[75] 



JOHN GILLEY 

decision, resource in emergencies, and 
courageous steadiness in difficulties and 
dangers. The shore fisherman or lobster- 
man on the coast of Maine, often going 
miles to sea alone in a half-decked boat, is 
liable to all sorts of vexatious or formida- 
ble weather changes — in summer to fog, 
calms, and squalls, in winter to low-lying 
icy vapor, blinding snow, and the sudden 
northwester at zero, against which he must 
beat homeward with the flying spray freez- 
ing fast to hull, sails, and rigging. The 
youth who learns to wring safety and 
success out of such adverse conditions has 
been taught by these struggles with nature 
to be vigilant, patient, self-reliant, and 
brave. In these temperate regions the 
adverse forces of nature are not, as they 
sometimes are in the tropics, irresistible 
and overwhelming. They can be resisted 
and overcome by man ; and so they de- 
velop in successive generations some of 
the best human qualities. 

It resulted from the principles in which 
the children had been brought up that no 
one of the boys began to save much of 

1 76 3 



JOHN GILLEY 

anything for himself until he was twenty- 
one years of age. It was therefore 1 843 
before John Gilley began to earn money 
on his own account. Good health, a strong 
body, skill as a sailor, and some knowl- 
edge of farming, stock-raising, and fishing, 
he had acquired. In what way should he 
now begin to use these acquisitions for his 
own advantage ? A fortunate change in 
his father's occupation fifteen years before 
probably facilitated John's entrance on a 
career of his own. William Gilley had 
been appointed light-keeper in 1828, with 
a compensation of three hundred and fifty 
dollars a year in money, the free occupa- 
tion of a house, and all the sperm-oil he 
could use in his household. He held this 
place until the year 1849, when, on the 
coming into power of the Whig party, he 
was turned out and a Whig was appointed 
in his place. Perhaps in recognition of 
his long service, it was considerately sug- 
gested to him that he might retain his 
position if he should see fit to join the 
dominant party ; but to this overture 
he replied, with some expletives, that he 

[77] 



JOHN GILLEY 

would not change his political connection 
for all the lighthouses in the United 
States. Now, three hundred and fifty 
dollars a year in cash, besides house and 
light, was a fortune to any coast-of-Maine 
family seventy years ago, — indeed, it still 
is, — -and William Gilley undoubtedly was 
able to lay up some portion of it, besides 
improving his buildings, live stock, boats, 
tools, and household furniture. From 
these savings the father was able to furnish 
a little money to start his sons each in 
his own career. This father was himself 
an irrepressible pioneer, always ready for 
a new enterprise. In 1837, long before 
he was turned out of the lighthouse, he 
bought for three hundred dollars Great 
Duck Island, an uninhabited island about 
five miles southwest of Baker's Island, 
and even more difficult of access, his 
project being to raise live stock there. 
Shortly after he ceased to be light-keeper, 
when he was about sixty-three years old, 
and his youngest children were grown up, 
he went to live on Great Duck, and there 
remained almost alone until he was nearly 

[78] 



JOHN GILLEY 

eighty years of age. His wife Hannah 
had become somewhat infirm, and was un- 
able to do more than make him occasional 
visits on Duck Island. She died at sixty- 
nine, but he lived to be ninety-two. Each 
lived in their declining years with one of 
their married sons, Hannah on Little 
Cranberry and William on Baker's. Such 
is the natural mode of taking care of old 
parents in a community where savings are 
necessarily small and only the able-bodied 
can really earn their livelihood. 

John Gilley's first venture was the pur- 
chase of a part of a small coasting schooner 
called the Preference, which could carry 
about one hundred tons, and cost between 
eight and nine hundred dollars. He be- 
came responsible for one-third of her value, 
paying down one or two hundred dollars, 
which his father probably lent him. For 
the rest of the third he obtained credit for 
a short time from the seller of the vessel. 
The other two owners were men who be- 
longed on Great Cranberry Island. The 
owners proceeded to use their purchase 
during all the mild weather — perhaps six 

[79] 



JOHN GILLEY 

months of each year — in carrying paving- 
stones to Boston. These stones, unlike 
the present rectangular granite blocks, 
were smooth cobblestones picked up on 
the outside beaches of the neighboring 
islands. They of course were not found 
on any inland or smooth-water beaches, 
but only where heavy waves rolled the 
beach-stones up and down. The crew of 
the Preference must therefore anchor her 
off an exposed beach, and then, with a 
large dory, boat off to her the stones which 
they picked up by hand. This work was 
possible only during moderate weather. 
The stones must be of tolerably uniform 
size, neither too large nor too small ; and 
each one had to be selected by the eye 
and picked up by the hand. When the 
dory was loaded, it had to be lifted off the 
beach by the men standing in the water, 
and rowed out to the vessel ; and there 
every single stone had to be picked up by 
hand and thrown on to the vessel. A 
hundred tons having been thus got aboard 
by sheer hard work of human muscle, the 
old craft, which was not too seaworthy, was 

[80] 



JOHN GILLEY 

sailed to Boston, to be discharged at what 
was then called the "Stone Wharf" in 
Charlestown. There the crew threw the 
stones out of her hold on to the wharf by 
hand. They therefore lifted and threw 
these hundred tons of stone three times at 
least before they were deposited on the 
city's wharf. The cobblestones were the 
main freight of the vessel ; but she also 
carried dried fish to Boston, and fetched 
back goods to the island stores of the 
vicinity. Some of the island people 
bought their flour, sugar, dry-goods, and 
other family stores in Boston through the 
captain of the schooner. John Gilley soon 
began to go as captain, being sometimes 
accompanied by the other owners and 
sometimes by men on wages. He was 
noted among his neighbors for the care and 
good judgment with which he executed 
their various commissions, and he knew 
himself to be trusted by them. This 
business he followed for several years, paid 
off his debt to the seller of the schooner, 
and began to lay up money. It was an 
immense satisfaction to him to feel him- 
6 [81 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

self thus established in an honest busi- 
ness which he understood, and in which 
he was making his way. There are few 
solider satisfactions to be won in this 
world by anybody, in any condition of 
life. The scale of the business — large 
or small — makes little difference in the 
measure of content. 

At that time — about 1843 to J ^5° — 
there were very few guides to navigation 
between Mount Desert and Boston com- 
pared with the numerous marks that the 
government now maintains. Charts were 
lacking, and the government had issued 
no coast-pilot. Blunt' s " Coast-Pilot " 
was the only book in use among the 
coastwise navigators, and its description 
of the coast of Maine, New Hampshire, 
and Massachusetts was very incomplete, 
though tolerably accurate in the few most 
important regions. It was often anxious 
business for the young owners of an old, 
uninsured vessel to encounter the various 
weather of the New England coast between 
the first of April and the first of Decem- 
ber. Their all and sometimes their lives 

[82] 



JOHN GILLEY 

were at stake on their own prudence, 
knowledge, and skill. None of them had 
knowledge of navigation in the technical 
sense ; they were coasting sailors only, 
who found their way from point to point 
along the shore by practice, keen observa- 
tion, and good memory for objects once 
seen and courses once safely steered. The 
young man who can do this work success- 
fully has some good grounds for self- 
respect. At this business John Gilley laid 
up several hundred dollars. In a few 
years he was able to sell the Preference and 
buy half of a much better vessel called the 
Express. She was larger, younger, and a 
better sailer, and cost her purchasers be- 
tween fifteen and sixteen hundred dollars. 
He followed the same business in the Ex- 
press for several years more, laying her up 
in the late autumn and fitting her out 
again every spring. The winters he gen- 
erally spent with his father and mother, or 
with one of his married brothers ; but even 
in such periods of comparative repose he 
kept busy, and was always trying to make 
a little money. He was fond of gunning, 

[8 3 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

and liked it all the better because it yielded 
feathers for sale. In December, 1853, he 
was staying with his brother Samuel Gil- 
ley on Little Cranberry Island, and gun- 
ning as usual ; but his brother observed 
that he did not sell the feathers which he 
assiduously collected. That winter there 
was a schoolteacher from Sullivan on Little 
Cranberry, who seemed to be an intelligent 
and pleasing girl. He made no remarks 
on the subject to his brother ; but that 
brother decided that John was looking for 
a wife — or, as this brother expressed it at 
the age of eighty-two, " John was thinking 
of looking out for the woman ; he saved 
his feathers — and actions speak louder 
than words." Morever, he sold his ves- 
sel at Rockland, and found himself in pos- 
session of nine or ten hundred dollars in 
money, the product of patient industry, 
and not the result of drawing a prize or 
two in the fishing lottery. In the follow- 
ing spring he went with six or seven other 
men, in a low-priced fishing-vessel of about 
thirty-five tons which his brother Samuel 
and he had bought, up the Bay of Fundy 

1 84 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

and to the banks between Mount Desert 
and Cape Sable, fishing for cod and had- 
dock. Every fortnight or three weeks the 
brothers came home to land their fish and 
get supplies ; but the schoolmistress had 
gone home to Sullivan. During that 
spring John Gilley crossed more than once 
to Sutton's Island, an island about a mile 
long, which lies between the Cranberry 
Islands and the Island of Mount Desert, 
with its long axis lying nearly east and west. 
On this island he bought, that season, a 
rough, neglected farm of about fifty acres, 
on which stood a house and barn. It was 
a great undertaking to put the buildings 
into habitable condition and clear up and 
improve the few arable fields. But John 
Gilley looked forward to the task with keen 
interest and a good hope, and he had the 
definite purpose of providing here a per- 
manent home for himself and a wife. 

When cold weather put an end to the 
fishing season, John Gilley, having pro- 
vided all necessary articles for his house, 
sailed over to Sullivan, distant about 
eighteen miles, in his fishing-vessel and 

[ 85 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

brought back to the home on Sutton's 
Island Harriet Bickford Wilkinson, the 
schoolmistress from Sullivan. The grand- 
father of Harriet Wilkinson came to Sulli- 
van from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 
in 1769, and her mother's family came 
from York, Maine. The marriage took 
place on December 25, 1854, when John 
was thirty-two and Harriet was twenty- 
five; and both entered with joy upon 
married life at their own island farm. She 
was a pretty woman, but delicate, belong- 
ing to a family which was thought to have 
a tendency to consumption. In the sum- 
mer of 1855 he spent about half his time 
on this same vessel which had brought 
home his wife, and made a fair profit on 
the fishing ; and the next year he some- 
times went on short trips of shore fishing; 
but that was the last of his going away 
from the farm. Whatever fishing he did 
afterward he did in an open boat not far 
from home, and he went coasting no 
more. A son was born to them, but 
lived only seven months ; and soon the 
wife's health began to fail- A wife's sick- 

[86] 



JOHN GILLEY 

ness, in the vast majority of families, 
means, first, the loss of her labor in the 
care and support of the household, and, 
secondly, the necessity of hiring some wo- 
man to do the work which the wife can- 
not do. This necessity of hiring is a 
heavy burden in a family where little 
money is earned, although there may be 
great comfort so far as food, fire, and cloth- 
ing are concerned. His young wife con- 
tinuing to grow worse, John Gilley tried 
all means that were possible to him to 
restore her health. He consulted the 
neighboring physicians, bought quantities 
of medicine in great variety, and tried in 
every way that love or duty could suggest 
to avert the threatening blow. It was all 
in vain. Harriet Gilley lived only] two 
years and a half after her marriage, dying 
in June, 1857. At this period, his expenses 
being large, and his earning power re- 
duced, John Gilley was forced to borrow a 
little money. The farm and the house- 
hold equipment had absorbed his whole 
capital. 

On April 27, 1857, there came from 
[87 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

Sullivan, to take care of Harriet, Mary 
Jane Wilkinson, her cousin. This cousin 
was only twenty-one years of age ; but her 
father was dead, and her mother had mar- 
ried again. She had helped her mother 
till she was almost twenty-one years of 
age, but now felt free. Until this cousin 
came, nieces and a sister of John Gilley 
had helped him to take care of his dying 
wife. The women relatives must always 
come to the aid of a family thus distressed. 
To help in taking care of the farm and in 
fishing, John Gilley habitually hired a man 
all through the season, and this season of 
1857 the hired man was his wife's brother. 
When Ha-rriet Gilley died, there was still 
the utmost need of a woman on the farm : 
so Mary Jane Wilkinson stayed during 
the summer and through the next winter, 
and before the end of that winter she had 
promised to marry John Gilley. There 
were at that time eight houses on Sutton's 
Island, and more permanent residents than 
there are now. Mary Jane Wilkinson was 
fond of the care of animals and of farm 
duties in general. She found at the farm 

[88] 



JOHN GILLEY 

only twelve hens, a cow, and a calf, and 
she set to work at once to increase the 
quantity of live stock ; but in April, 1858, 
she returned to her mother's house at 
West Gouldsboro', that she might prepare 
her wardrobe and some articles of house- 
hold linen. When, later in the season, 
John Gilley came after Mary Jane Wilkin- 
son at Jones's Cove, he had to transport to 
Sutton's Island, besides Mary Jane's per- 
sonal possessions, a pair of young steers, a 
pig, and a cat. They were married at 
North-East Harbor by Squire Kimball, in 
the old tavern on the west side of the 
harbor, in July, 1858 ; and then these two 
set about improving their condition by 
unremitting industry and frugality, and an 
intelligent use of every resource the place 
afforded. The new wife gave her attention 
to the poultry and made butter whenever 
the milk could not be sold as such. The 
price of butter had greatly improved since 
John Gilley was a boy on Baker's Island. 
It could now be sold at from twenty to 
twenty-five cents a pound. In summer 
Squire Kimball, at the tavern, bought their 

[89 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

milk. All summer eggs could be sold at 
the stores on the neighboring islands ; but 
in the fall it was necessary to send them to 
Boston. During the fishing season the 
husband frequently went for fish in an 
open boat with one sail ; but he no longer 
absented himself from home for weeks at 
a time. His labor on the farm was inces- 
sant. On the crest of the island a small 
field had been cleared by the former 
occupant of the house. With the help of 
a yoke of oxen John Gilley proceeded to 
add to this field on the east and on the 
west. The piles of stones which he heaped 
up on the bare ledges remain to this day 
to testify to his industry. One of them 
is twenty-four feet long, fifteen feet wide, 
and five feet high. In after years he was 
proud of these piles, regarding them as 
monuments to his patient industry and 
perseverance in the redemption, or rather 
creation, of this precious mowing-field. 

In these labors three or four years had 
passed away, when the Civil War broke 
out, and soon, linseed-oil becoming scarce, 
porgy-oil attained an unheard of value. 

[90] 



JOHN GILLEY 

Fortunately for the New England shore 
people, the porgies arrived in shoals on 
the coast in every season for rather more 
than ten years. At various places along 
the shore from Long Island Sound to the 
Bay of Fundy, large factories were built 
for expressing the oil from these fish ; but 
this was an industry which could also be 
well conducted on a small scale with a few 
nets, a big kettle, and a screw-press worked 
by hand. For an enterprising and ener- 
getic man here was a new chance of getting 
profit from the sea. Accordingly, John 
Gilley, like thousands of other fishermen 
along the New England coast, set up a 
small porgy-oil factory, and during the 
porgy season this was his most profitable 
form of industry. During the last part 
of the war porgy-oil sold at a dollar or 
even a dollar and ten cents a gallon. The 
chum, or refuse from the press, was a valu- 
able element in manure. All of John 
Gilley's porgy-chum went to enrich his 
precious fields. We may be sure that 
this well-used opportunity gave him great 
satisfaction. 

[91 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

The farm, like most farms on the 
Maine shore, not sufficing for the comfort- 
able support of his family, John Gilley 
was always looking for another industry 
by which he could add to his annual in- 
come. He found such an industry in the 
manufacture of smoked herring. This 
was at that time practised in two ways 
among the island people. Fresh herring 
were caught near home, and were immedi- 
ately corned and smoked ; and salted her- 
ring brought from the Magdalen Islands 
were bought by the vessel-load, soaked in 
fresh water to remove a part of the salt, 
and then smoked. John Gilley built a 
large smoke-house on his shore close to a 
safe and convenient anchorage, and there 
pursued the herring business in both forms, 
whenever supplies of herring could be ob- 
tained. This is an industry in which 
women can bear a part. They can pull 
out the gills and string the wet fish on the 
sticks by which they are hung up in the 
smoke-house ; and they can pack the dried 
fish into the boxes in which they are mar- 
keted. So the wife and the eldest daughter, 

[92] 



JOHN GILLEY 

as time went on, took a hand in this her- 
ring work. The sawed lumber for the 
boxes was all brought from the saw-mill 
at the head of Somes Sound, eight miles 
away. The men did that transportation, 
and nailed the boxes together. It was 
characteristic of John Gilley that he al- 
ways took pains to have his things better 
than anybody else's. He was careful and 
particular about all his work, and thor- 
oughly believed in the good results of this 
painstaking care. He was always confi- 
dent that his milk, butter, eggs, fowls, 
porgy-oil, and herring were better than the 
common, and were worth a higher price; 
and he could often induce purchasers to 
think so, too. 

Of the second marriage there came 
three girls, who all grew to maturity, and 
two of whom were married in due season ; 
but when John Gilley was seventy-four 
years old he had but two grandchildren, 
of whom the elder was only eight years 
old, his fate in this respect being far less 
fortunate than that of his father. Late 
marriage caused him to miss some of the 

[93 1 



JOHN GILLEY 

most exquisite of natural human delights. 
He could not witness the coming of grand- 
children to maturity. He had the nat- 
ural, animal fondness — so to speak — for 
children, the economic liking for them as 
helpers, and the real love for them as 
affectionate comrades and friends. 

The daughters were disposed to help in 
the support of the family and the care of 
the farm. The eldest went through the 
whole course of the Normal School at Cas- 
tine, and became a teacher. The youngest 
was best at household and farm work, hav- 
ing her father's head for business. The 
other daughter was married early, but had 
already gone from her father's house to 
Little Cranberry Island as a helper in the 
family of the principal storekeeper on that 
island. Since the household needed the 
assistance of another male, it was their cus- 
tom to hire a well-grown boy or a man dur- 
ing the better part of the year, the wages 
for such services being not more than 
from fifteen to twenty dollars a month in 
addition to board and lodging. 

Although the island lay much nearer to 

[94] 



JOHN GILLEY 

the shores of Mount Desert than Baker's 
Island did, the family had hardly more in- 
tercourse with the main island than William 
Gilley's family on Baker's Island had had 
a generation before. They found their 
pleasures chiefly at home. In the winter 
evenings they read aloud to one another, 
thus carrying down to another generation 
the habit which Hannah Lurvey Gilley 
had established in her family. The same 
good habit has been transmitted to the 
family of one of John Gilley's married 
daughters, where it is now in force. 

In the early autumn of 1874 a serious 
disaster befell this industrious and thriv- 
ing family. One evening Mr. and Mrs. 
Gilley were walking along the southern 
shore of the island toward a neighbor's 
house, when John suggested that it was 
time for Mary Jane to get the supper, and 
for him to attend to the fire in the smoke- 
house, which was full of herring hung up 
to smoke, and also contained on the floor 
a large quantity of packed herring, the 
fruit of the entire summer's work on her- 
ring. The smoke-house was large, and 

[95] 



JOHN GILLEY 

at one end there stood a carpenter's bench 
with a good many tools. It was also used 
as a place of storage for rigging, anchors, 
blocks, and other seamen's gear. Mrs. 
Gilley went home and made ready the 
supper. John Gilley arranged the fire as 
usual in the smoke-house, and went up to 
the house from the shore. As the family 
were sitting at supper, a neighbor, who 
had been calling there and had gone out, 
rushed back, exclaiming, " Your smoke- 
house is all afire ! " So indeed it was ; 
and in a few minutes John Gilley's chief 
investment and all his summer's work 
went up in flames. The whole family ran 
to the scene, but it was too late to do 
more than save the fish-house which stood 
near. John opened the door of the smoke- 
house and succeeded in rescuing a pair of 
oiled trousers and his precious compass, 
which stood on a shelf by the door. Ev- 
erything else was burned up clean. John 
said but little at the moment, and looked 
calmly on at the quick destruction ; but 
when he went to bed that night, he broke 
down and bewailed his loss with tears and 

[96] 



JOHN GILLEY 

sobs. He had lost not only a sum of 
money which was large for him, — perhaps 
five hundred dollars, — but, what was more, 
he had lost an object of interest and affec- 
tion, and a means of livelihood which rep- 
resented years of patient labor. It was as 
if a mill-owner had lost his mill without 
insurance, or the owner of a noble vessel 
had seen her go down within sight of 
home. This was the only time in all their 
married life that his wife ever saw him 
overcome by such emotion. In conse- 
quence of this disaster, it was necessary 
for John Gilley, in order to buy stores 
enough for the ensuing winter, to sell part 
of the live stock off his farm. This fact 
shows how close may be the margin of 
livelihood for a family on the New Eng- 
land coast which really owns a good deal 
of property and is justly held by its neigh- 
bors to be well off. If the cash proceeds 
of a season's work are lost or destroyed, 
extraordinary and undesirable means have 
to be taken to carry over the family to 
another season. This may happen to 
a healthy, industrious, frugal household. 

? [97] 



JOHN GILLEY 

Much worse, of course, may happen in 
consequence of sudden disaster in an un- 
thrifty or sickly family. The investments 
of poor men are apt to be very hazardous. 
They put their all into farming-tools or 
live stock ; they risk everything they have 
on an old vessel or on a single crop, and 
therefore on the weather of a single season ; 
with their small savings they build a barn 
or a smoke-house, which may be reduced 
to ashes with all its contents in fifteen 
minutes. Insurance they can seldom af- 
ford. If the investments of the rich were 
as hazardous as are those of the poor, 
theirs would be a lot even more worrisome 
than it is now. 

The smoke-house was never rebuilt. 
At first the money to rebuild was lacking, 
and later a new prospect opened before 
the family. After the fire John Gilley 
went more into cows and less into fat oxen. 
Hitherto he had always kept a good yoke 
of oxen and some steers, and he had been 
accustomed to do their hauling and plough- 
ing for all the families on the island. 
Thereafter he generally had as many as 

[98 1 



JOHN GILLEY 

five cows, but often only a single young 
ox to do the hauling for the island. He 
always trained his oxen himself, and had 
pleasure in the company of these patient 
and serviceable creatures. 

In 1880 the Gilleys on Sutton's Island 
heard that three " Westerners/' or " rus- 
ticators," had bought land at North-East 
Harbor. One was said to be a bishop, 
another the president of a college, and the 
third and earliest buyer a landscape-gar- 
dener — whatever that might be. It was 
even reported that one of these pioneers 
had landed on the western end of Sutton's 
Island and walked the length of the island. 
The news was intensely interesting to all 
the inhabitants. They had heard of the 
fabulous prices of land at Bar Harbor, and 
their imaginations began to play over their 
own pastures and wood-lots. John Gilley 
went steadily on his laborious and thrifty 
way. He served the town in various ca- 
pacities, such as selectman and collector 
of taxes. He was one of the school com- 
mittee for several years, and later one of 
the board of health. He was also road 

[99] 



JOHN GILLEY 

surveyor on the island — there being but 
one road, and that grass-grown. As a 
town officer John Gilley exhibited the 
same uprightness and frugality which he 
showed in all his private dealings. To be 
chosen to responsible office by his fellow- 
townsmen, every one of whom knew him 
personally, was to him a source of rational 
gratification ; and in each of his offices he 
had occasion to enlarge his knowledge and 
to undertake new responsibilities. 

In 1884 the extreme western point of 
Sutton's Island was sold to a " Westerner," 
a professor in Harvard College, and shortly 
after a second sale in the same neighbor- 
hood was effected ; but it was not until 
1886 that John Gilley made his first sale 
of land for summering purposes. In the 
next year he made another sale, and in 
1894 a third. The prices he obtained, 
though moderate compared with the prices 
charged at Bar Harbor or North-East Har- 
bor, were forty or fifty times any price 
which had ever been put on his farm by 
the acre. Being thus provided with what 
was for him a considerable amount of ready 

[ 100 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

money, he did what all his like do when 
they come into possession of ready money 
— he first gave himself and his family the 
pleasure of enlarging and improving his 
house and other buildings, and then lent 
the balance on small mortgages on village 
real estate. Suddenly he became a pros- 
perous man, at ease, and a leader in his 
world. Up to this time, since his second 
marriage, he had merely earned a com- 
fortable livelihood by diversified industry ; 
but now he possessed a secured capital in 
addition to his farm and its buildings. At 
last, he was highly content, but neverthe- 
less ready as ever for new undertakings. 
His mind was active, and his eye and hand 
were steady. 

When three cottages had stood for 
several years on the eastern foreside of 
North-East Harbor, — the nearest point 
of the shore of Mount Desert to Sutton's 
Island, — John Gilley, at the age of sev- 
enty-one, undertook to deliver at these 
houses milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables 
every day, and chickens and fowls when 
they were wanted. This undertaking in- 

[ 10! ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

volved his rowing in all weathers nearly 
two miles from his cove to the landings 
of these houses, and back again, across 
bay waters which are protected indeed from 
the heavy ocean swells, but are still able 
to produce what the natives call " a big 
chop." Every morning he arrived with 
the utmost punctuality, in rain or shine, 
calm or blow, and alone, unless it blew 
heavily from the northwest (a head wind 
from Sutton's), or his little grandson — 
his mate, as he called the boy — wanted 
to accompany him on a fine, still morning. 
Soon he extended his trips to the western 
side of North-East Harbor, where he 
found a much larger market for his goods 
than he had found thirty-five years before, 
when he first delivered milk at Squire 
Kimball's tavern. This business involved 
what was new work for John Gilley, 
namely, the raising of fresh vegetables in 
much larger variety and quantity than he 
was accustomed to. He entered on this 
new work with interest and intelligence, 
but was of course sometimes defeated in 
his plans by wet weather in spring, a 

[102 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

drought in summer, or by the worms and 
insects which unexpectedly attacked his 
crops. On the whole he was decidedly 
successful in this enterprise undertaken at 
seventy-one. Those who bought of him 
liked to deal with him, and he found in 
the business fresh interest and pleasure. 
Not many men take up a new out-of-door 
business at seventy, and carry it on suc- 
cessfully by their own brains and muscles. 
It was one of the sources of his satisfaction 
that he thus supplied the two daughters 
who still lived at his house with a profita- 
ble outlet for their energies. One of these 
— the school-teacher — was an excellent 
laundress, and the other was devoted to 
the work of the house and the farm, and 
was helpful in her father's new business. 
John Gilley transported the washes from 
North-East Harbor and back again in his 
rowboat, and under the new conditions of 
the place washing and ironing proved to 
be more profitable than school-keeping. 

In the fall of 1896 the family which had 
occupied that summer one of the houses 
John Gilley was in the habit of supplying 

[ 103 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

with milk, eggs, and vegetables, and which 
had a young child dependent on the milk, 
lingered after the other summer house- 
holds had departed. He consented to 
continue his daily trips a few days into 
October that the child's milk might not 
be changed, although it was perfectly clear 
that his labor could not be adequately 
recompensed. On the last morning but 
one that he was to come across from the 
island to the harbor a strong northeast wind 
was blowing, and some sea was running 
through the deep passage between Sutton's 
Island and Bear Island, which he had to 
cross on his way to and fro. He took 
with him in his boat the young man who 
had been working for him on the farm the 
few weeks past. They delivered the milk, 
crossed to the western side of North-East 
Harbor, did some errands there, and 
started cheerfully for home, as John Gilley 
had done from that shore hundreds of 
times before. The boy rowed from a seat 
near the bow, and the old man sat on the 
thwart near the stern, facing the bow, and 
pushing his oars from him. They had no 

[ io4 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

thought of danger ; but to ease the rowing 
they kept to windward under Bear Island, 
and then pushed across the deep channel, 
south by west, for the western point of 
Sutton's Island. They were more than 
half-way across when, through some inatten- 
tion or lack of skill on the part of the young 
man in the bow, a sea higher or swifter 
than the rest threw a good deal of water 
into the boat. John Gilley immediately 
began to bail, and told the rower to keep 
her head to the waves. The overweighted 
boat was less manageable than before, and 
in a moment another roller turned her 
completely over. Both men clung to the 
boat and climbed on to her bottom. She 
drifted away before the wind and sea 
toward South-West Harbor. The over- 
setting of the boat had been seen from 
both Bear Island and Sutton's Island ; but 
it was nearly three quarters of an hour be- 
fore the rescuers could reach the floating 
boat, and then the young man, though 
unconscious, was still clinging to the boat's 
keel, but the old man, chilled by the cold 
water and stunned by the waves which 

1 105 ] 



JOHN GILLEY 

beat about his head, had lost his hold and 
sunk into the sea. In half an hour John 
Gilley had passed from a hearty and suc- 
cessful old age in this world, full of its 
legitimate interests and satisfactions, into 
the voiceless mystery of death. No trace 
of his body was ever found. It disap- 
peared into the waters on which he had 
played and worked as boy and man all his 
long and fortunate life. He left his fam- 
ily well provided for, and full of gratitude 
and praise for his honorable career and his 
sterling character. 

This is the life of one of the forgotten 
millions. It contains no material for dis- 
tinction, fame, or long remembrance ; but 
it does contain the material and present 
the scene for a normal human develop- 
ment through mingled joy and sorrow, 
labor and rest, adversity and success, and 
through the tender loves of childhood, 
maturity, and age. We cannot but be- 
lieve that it is just for countless quiet, 
simple lives like this that God made and 
upholds this earth. 

[ 106 ] 



GREAT RICHES 



GREAT RICHES 

SINCE the Civil War a new kind of 
rich man has come into existence in 
the United States. He is very much 
richer than anybody ever was before, and 
his riches are, in the main, of a new kind. 
They are not great areas of land, or nu- 
merous palaces, or flocks and herds, or 
thousands of slaves, or masses of chattels. 
They are in part city rents, but chiefly 
stocks and bonds of corporations, and 
bonds of states, counties, cities, and towns. 
These riches carry with them of necessity 
no visible or tangible responsibility, and 
bring upon their possessor no public or 
semi-public functions. 

The rich men are neither soldiers nor 
sailors ; they are not magistrates, or legis- 
lators, or church dignitaries. They are 
not landlords in the old sense ; and they 
never lead their tenants into battle as did 

[ 109 ] 



GREAT RICHES 

the feudal chiefs. They have no public 
functions of an importance commensurate 
with their riches. They are not subject 
to the orders and caprices of a sovereign, 
or forced to contend with the intrigues and 
vices of a court. Such occupations as 
they have, in addition to the making of 
more money, they have to invent them- 
selves. The public admires and envies 
them, and sees that they are often service- 
able, but also criticises and blames them, 
and to some extent fears them. It is dis- 
posed to think them dangerous to the 
Republic and a blot on democratic society ; 
but at the same time is curious about their 
doings and their mode of life, and is in 
rather a puzzle about their moral quality. 
I propose to consider briefly some of the 
advantages and disadvantages which great 
modern riches bring the owner and the 
community. 

COMFORTS 

The modern very rich man can, of course, 
procure for himself and his family every 
comfort. He can secure invariably all 



GREAT RICHES 

possible comfortable provisions in every- 
place where he dwells, — in his own 
houses, or in hotels, trains, and steamers ; 
but still his wealth will not ordinarily pro- 
cure for him greater personal comfort than 
persons of moderate fortune can command. 
A twelve-dollar chair may be just as com- 
fortable as a fifty-dollar chair. There is 
pleasure in living in a palace ; but when 
its inmates want to be comfortable they 
get into the small rooms, — into the bou- 
doir, or the little writing-room, or the low- 
studded small parlor. A soft bed is for 
many persons not so comfortable as a hard 
one. In short, adequate warmth and 
light, appropriate clothing, good bedding, 
good plumbing, and nice chairs, tables, 
and household fittings sufficient to ensure 
bodily comfort, are easily within the reach 
of all well-to-do persons ; and great riches 
can do no more for their possessor in the 
way of comfort. The least physical ailment, 
like a gouty toe, or a dull ear, or a decayed 
tooth, will subtract more from comfort 
than all the riches in the world can add. 



GREAT RICHES 



PLEASURES 



With pleasures it is different. Some 
real pleasures are very expensive, and only- 
great riches can procure them. For in- 
stance, the unobstructed and impregnable 
possession of a fine natural landscape is a 
great pleasure which the very rich man 
can secure for himself by his private 
means ; whereas the poor man, or the man 
of moderate means, can enjoy such a priv- 
ilege only by availing himself of great 
public domains, or of unoccupied regions; 
and there his own privilege will not be 
secure, or transmissible to descendants. 
The very rich man can provide himself 
with music and the drama without regard 
to their cost ; but it by no means requires 
very great riches to procure a quite ad- 
equate amount of these pleasures. Such 
pleasures as involve the purchase and 
maintenance of very costly machines like 
yachts, or large automobiles, or of great 
stables filled with fine horses and carriages, 
or of large greenhouses and gardens, may 

[ »* ] 



GREAT RICHES 

be enjoyed in their extremes only by the 
very rich ; but then, on a smaller scale, 
similar pleasures may be equally enjoyed 
by persons who are only moderately well- 
off, and often the larger scale does not add 
to the pleasure. An active boy in a 
knock-about twenty feet long may easily 
get more fun out of racing or cruising than 
his fifty-year-old father can get out of his 
six-hundred-ton steam yacht. The young 
lawyer who is fond of riding may easily get 
more pleasure out of his single saddle 
horse, kept at a club stable, than the multi- 
millionaire gets from his forty horses and 
twenty different carriages. 

One advantage the very rich man un- 
doubtedly has. Many so-called pleasures 
pall after a little while. The possessor of 
numerous horses and carriages, for ex- 
ample, finds that he has no pleasure in 
driving or riding. He is tired of it all. 
Or, to his surprise, he finds his yacht a 
bore, and, on the whole, a plague. Then 
he can cast aside the pleasure which is no 
longer a pleasure, and take up with some 
new fad or fever. He can utterly disre- 
8 [ US ] 



GREAT RICHES 

gard cost in turning from one pleasure to 
another. He can seize on costly novelties 
which promise a new pleasurable sensation, 
and experiment with them on a small 
chance of winning some satisfaction. This 
is assuredly a freedom which great riches 
bring ; but it is not a very valuable free- 
dom. One steady, permanent outdoor 
pleasure, if pursued with unflagging de- 
light, is worth many shifting transitory 
pleasures. 

The public does not grudge their pleas- 
ures to the very rich, provided they can be 
pursued without harming others. Indeed, 
the public approves all the manly, out- 
door, risky sports of the rich, if not incon- 
siderately pursued, and rather prefers the 
very rich man who is extravagant in these 
ways to one who has no interest in sports. 

The pleasure of travelling is one which 
is open to the very rich, and this is in 
general an instructive and enlarging pleas- 
ure. The length of the traveller's purse 
is, however, the least important item in 
his equipment. The main items are eyes 
to see beauty, ears to appreciate music, a 

[«4] 



GREAT RICHES 

memory stored with historical information, 
and power to talk with the peoples visited. 
The very rich man, although poorly 
equipped, will do well to travel far and 
often ; but his relatively impecunious 
neighbor who is mentally well prepared 
for foreign travel will far better enjoy 
his journeyings, although they be much 
cheaper than the rich man's. 



LUXURIES 

When it comes to what are called luxu- 
ries, the very rich have undoubtedly an 
advantage over other people, if one can 
imagine the possession and use of a lux- 
ury to be in any sense an advantage. 
Thus, the very rich can procure for them- 
selves all sorts of rare and delicious foods 
and drinks. They can have fruits and 
vegetables out of season, and fish and 
game brought from afar. They can drink 
the finest champagne, or claret, or Rhine 
wine, or cordial, without ever consider- 
ing its cost. Indeed, they may prefer a 

t «5i 



GREAT RICHES 

costly drink, and enjoy it more, just for 
the reason that it is costly. 

These pleasures of the palate the man 
of moderate means can only enjoy in brief 
seasons or at long intervals. It may be 
doubted, however, whether the very rich 
man gets any more pleasure from his 
palate and his organs of smell in the 
course of the year than the man who is 
compelled to follow the changes of the 
season in the selection of his foods and 
drinks. Strawberries in January are not 
so good as strawberries in June, and straw- 
berries for two months of the year, chang- 
ing to raspberries, currants, blueberries, 
and blackberries, may give more gratifica- 
tion on the whole than strawberries for six 
months of the year. The same thing 
may be said concerning the enjoyment of 
flowers and flowering plants in the house. 
The very rich man can order from some 
florist a profusion of flowers for all the 
rooms in his house through the entire 
season. The regular commercial flowers 
like roses, carnations, violets, chrysanthe- 
mums, and so forth, will be supplied in 

[ »6 ] 



GREAT RICHES 

great quantities, and the spring flowers 
will be forced in greenhouses, and will ap- 
pear in the drawing-room in January and 
February. These beautiful objects will 
adorn the very rich man's rooms the year 
round, and their fragrance will penetrate 
every part of his house. He and his 
family will enjoy them ; but it is doubtful 
whether he will get so much pleasure out 
of all this hired decoration as the owner 
of one little garden and one little glass 
bow window will get out of his few beds, 
pots, and vases filled with only seasonable 
blooms, all of which he has worked over 
and cared for himself. At any rate, it is 
a different kind of pleasure, and not so 
keen and inexhaustible. Money indeed 
can buy these beautiful objects, but money 
cannot buy the capacity to enjoy them. 
That capacity may or may not go with 
the possession of the money. 

OBJECTS OF BEAUTY 

There are, however, luxuries of a rarer 
sort which the very rich man can secure 

["7] 



GREAT RICHES 

for himself and his family, while the poor 
man, or the man of moderate means, can- 
not procure them at all. Such a luxury 
is the ownership of beautiful artistic 
objects, — of fine pictures, etchings, statu- 
ary, or beautiful examples of ceramic art. 

To have these objects in one's house 
within reach, or often before the eyes, is a 
great luxury, if their possessor has eyes to 
see their beauty. This is a clear advan- 
tage which the very rich man may have 
over a man of small means. When, how- 
ever, the accumulator of great riches is an 
uneducated man, as is often the case, he 
is little likely to possess the intellectual 
quality which is indispensable to the en- 
joyment of the fine arts. This Is one 
of the reasons that the newly rich are apt 
to be ridiculed or despised. They are 
thought to be people who are pecuniarily 
able to gratify fine tastes, but have no 
such tastes. 

The possession of beautiful and costly 
jewels is a luxury which rich people — 
whether educated or ignorant — often 
seem to enjoy. They like to see their 

[ "8] 



GREAT RICHES 

women decked with beautiful gems. It is 
to be said in behalf of this luxury that it 
is a gratification which does no bodily 
harm to anybody, and gives pleasure to 
many observers besides the possessor of 
the jewels. The only criticism which can 
be made on indulgence in this luxury is 
that the money it costs might have been 
more productive of human happiness if 
spent in other ways. A million dollars' 
worth of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and 
pearls might have endowed a school or a 
hospital, or have made a mill or a foundry 
a healthy place to work in instead of an 
unhealthy one, or have provided a public 
playground for many generations to enjoy. 
Nevertheless, in some measure nearly 
every one enjoys this particular luxury, 
whether in savage or in civilized society. 

AIDS TO HEALTH 

In the care of health — their own and 
that of those they love — very rich peo- 
ple have certain indisputable advantages, 
although they also suffer from peculiar 

t ^9] 



GREAT RICHES 

exposure to the diseases consequent on 
luxury and ennui. Thus, they are under 
no necessity of enduring excessive labor, 
but can order their daily lives so as to 
avoid all strains and excesses in work. 
Moreover, if any physical evil befall them 
or those they love, they can procure all 
possible aids in the way of skilled attend- 
ants and medical or surgical advice ; and 
they can procure for themselves and their 
families any advised change of scene or 
climate, and procure it at the right 
moment, and in the most comfortable 
way. Lord Rosebery has pointed out 
that this freedom to spend money for aids 
in case of sickness or accident is the chief 
advantage the rich man has over the poor 
man ; but it should be observed that one 
need not be very rich in order to procure 
these advantages in case of illness or ac- 
cident. Moreover, remedies for disease 
are a poor substitute for health. The 
ability to pay for any amount of massage 
is an imperfect compensation for the loss 
of enjoyable use of the muscles in work 
and play, or for the exhaustion of the 

[ 120 ] 



GREAT RICHES 

nervous system. No one who has had 
large means of observation can have failed 
to see that the very rich are by no means 
the healthiest and most vigorous members 
of the community. The uneducated rich 
seem to be peculiarly liable to medical 
delusions, perhaps because their wealth 
enables them to try in quick succession all 
sorts of expensive cure-alls and quack- 
eries. Their wealth has its own disad- 
vantageous effects on their bodies. Thus, 
the keen pursuit of wealth is often excit- 
ing and exacting ; to keep and defend 
great wealth is sometimes an anxious busi- 
ness ; and if great riches bring with them 
a habit of self-indulgence and of luxurious 
living in general, it is well-nigh certain 
that the self-indulgent and luxurious per- 
son will suffer bodily evils which his plain- 
living neighbors will escape. Of course 
a wise rich man may escape all these per- 
ils of luxury. He may keep himself in 
good physical condition by all sorts of 
outdoor sports. He may do as the Duke 
of Wellington is said to have habitually 
done — provide elaborate French dishes 

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GREAT RICHES 

for his guests at dinner, and himself eat 
two plain chops and a boiled potato; but 
such an habitual self-protection requires 
an unusual amount of will-power and 
prudence. Health being the chief bless- 
ing of life after the domestic affections, the 
fact that very rich people have no advan- 
tage over common people in respect to 
keeping their health, but rather are at a 
disadvantage, suggests strongly that there 
is a formidable discount on the possession 
of great riches. 



SATISFACTIONS NOT DEPENDENT ON 
WEALTH 

All thinking men and women get the 
main satisfactions of life, aside from the 
domestic joys, out of the productive work 
they do. It is therefore a pertinent in- 
quiry — what occupations are open to the 
very rich, occupations from which they can 
get solid satisfaction ? In the first place, 
they can have, on a large scale, the satis- 
faction which accompanies the continuous 
accumulation of property. This satisfac- 

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tion, however, is fortunately a very com- 
mon one. The man or the woman who 
earns five or six hundred dollars a year 
and lays up a hundred dollars of this in- 
come, may enjoy this satisfaction to a high 
degree. It is a serious error to suppose 
that satisfaction in the acquisition of prop- 
erty is proportionate to the amount of 
property acquired. A man can be as eager 
and pleased over the accumulation of a 
few hundred dollars as he can be over a 
few million ; just as it may be much more 
generous for one man or woman to give 
away five dollars than it is for another to 
give away five hundred thousand. That 
is the reason that property is so secure in 
a democracy. Almost everybody has some 
property ; and the man who has a little 
will fight for that little as fiercely as the 
man who has a great deal. The passion 
for accumulation is doubtless highly grat- 
ified in the very rich man's case; and there 
is apparently a kind of pride which is grat- 
ified by the possession of monstrous sums 
merely because they are monstrous, just 
as some people seem to be gratified by be- 

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ing twitched through space at the rate of 
fifty miles an hour because it is fifty and 
not twenty. This well-nigh universal de- 
sire to acquire and accumulate is, of course, 
the source of the progressive prosperity of 
a vigorous and thrifty race. It provides 
what is called capital. The very rich man 
has unquestionably much more capacity in 
this direction than the average man. He 
accumulates on a much larger scale than 
the average man, and in all probability, 
although his satisfaction is not proportion- 
ate to the size of his accumulations, he 
gets somewhat more satisfaction from this 
source than the man whose accumulations 
are small. 

To build a palace at fifty years of age 
in city or country, and maintain it hand- 
somely for his family, seems to be a nat- 
ural performance for a very rich man. It 
is interesting to build a palace, and it af- 
fords some temporary occupation ; but it 
is incredible that this achievement should 
give as much pleasure to the owner as a 
young mechanic gets who has saved a few 
hundred dollars, and then builds a six- 

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room cottage, to which he brings a young 
wife. He, being skilful at his trade, 
builds the cottage largely with his own 
hands, and she, out of her savings, pro- 
vides the household linen and her own 
wardrobe. The achievement of the me- 
chanic and his wife is a personal one, hal- 
lowed by the most sacred loves and hopes. 
The palace is the rich owner's public 
triumph, finely executed by hired artists 
and laborers. It is a personal achievement 
only in an indirect way. 

THE RICH MAN'S POWER 

A great capital at the disposal of a 
single will confers on its possessor power 
over the course of industrial development, 
over his fellowmen, and sometimes over 
the course of great public events like peace 
or war between nations. For some na- 
tures it is a real satisfaction to be thus a 
sort of Providence to multitudes of men 
and women, able at pleasure to do them 
good or harm, to give them joy or pain, 
and in position to be feared or looked up 

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to. Great capital directed by one mind 
may be compared to the mill pond above 
the dam, which stores power subject to the 
mill owner's direction. There is pleasure 
and satisfaction in directing such a power ; 
and the greater the power, the greater may 
be the satisfaction. In giving this direc- 
tion the great capitalist may find an enjoy- 
able and strenuous occupation. For a 
conscientious, dutiful man a great sense of 
responsibility accompanies the possession 
of power, and this sense of responsibility 
may become so painful as to quite over- 
come all enjoyment of the power itself; 
but nevertheless we cannot but recognize 
the fact that the exercise of power gives 
pleasure and satisfaction without this 
drawback to men of arbitrary tempera- 
ment, or of an inconsiderate disposition 
which takes no account of the needs or 
wishes of others. 

The most successful businesses are those 
conducted by remarkably intelligent and 
just autocrats ; and probably the same 
would be true of governments, if any mode 
had been invented of discovering and put- 

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ting in place the desirable autocrats. The 
prevailing modes of discovery and selection, 
such as hereditary transmission, or election 
by a Pretorian guard or an army, have 
been so very unsuccessful that autocracy 
as a mode of government has justly fallen 
into disrepute. In business enterprises the 
existing modes of discovering and select- 
ing autocrats seem to be better than in 
governments ; for autocracy in business is 
often justified by its results. The autocrat 
in business is almost invariably a capital- 
ist; and when he possesses great riches he 
may be, and often is, highly serviceable to 
his community or his nation through his 
beneficial direction of accumulated and 
stored power. Whether he himself wins 
satisfaction through the exercise of his 
power depends on his temperament, dispo- 
sition, and general condition of physical 
and moral health. When great riches are 
stored up in possession of one man, or one 
family, the power which resides in them 
can be directed by one mind into that 
channel, or those channels, where it can be 
made most effective, and this effective 

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direction it is which brings out in high 
relief the usefulness of great riches. 

What are ordinarily called benefactions 
— that is, gifts for beneficial uses — are, 
therefore, by no means the only benefits 
very rich men can confer on the com- 
munity to which they belong. Any man 
who, by sound thinking and hard work, 
develops and carries on a productive in- 
dustry, and by his good judgment makes 
that industry both profitable and stable, 
confers an immense benefit on society. 
This is indeed the best outcome of great 
riches. I 

IMPROVING THE LAND 

Very rich men can, if they choose, win 
certain natural satisfactions which are not 
accessible to the poor or to the merely 
well-to-do. If they have the taste for such 
labors, they can improve fields and woods, 
brooks and ponds, make a barren soil 
fertile, raise the best breeds of cattle, 
horses, swine, and sheep, and in general 
add to the productiveness and beauty of a 

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great estate. They can develop landscape 
beauty on a large scale, making broad 
tracts of country more beautiful and more 
enjoyable. Since earth-work is the most 
durable of all human works, the wise im- 
provement of a great estate is a lasting 
contribution to human welfare and a 
worthy occupation of any man's time. It 
is a subject which will usefully employ all 
the senses of the keenest observer and the 
best judgment of a prudent but enthusiastic 
inventor and promoter. Whoever makes 
a farm, a forest, or a garden yield more 
than it did before has made a clear addi- 
tion to mankind's control of nature. For 
persons who have a natural taste for such 
employments a keen gratification accom- 
panies success in them. Very rich men 
can win this satisfaction with greater cer- 
tainty than men who must always be con- 
sidering whether the improvement they 
have projected will forthwith pay its cost. 
There is, however, a serious drawback 
on the satisfaction very rich men can de- 
rive from improving their estates, namely, 
an uncertainty with regard to the mainte- 
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nance of the improved estate in the family 
of its chief creator. In this country it is 
difficult to pass down to another genera- 
tion large holdings of lands, at least with 
any assurance that the holdings will be 
kept. It frequently happens that no child 
of the rich man wishes, or is even willing, 
to keep up its father's establishment ; and 
indeed, in many cases no child is really 
able to maintain the father's establishment, 
having received only a fraction of the 
father's capital. Estates inherited through 
three generations are rare in the United 
State, particularly great estates brought 
together by very rich men. Ordinary 
farms are in a few cases transmitted through 
three generations, and some farms which 
have been lost to the family which made 
them are at times bought back in later gen- 
erations by descendants of the original 
proprietors ; but on the whole the trans- 
mission of landed estates from generation 
to generation is unusual in this country. 
Any rich man, therefore, who spends 
thought and money on the improvement 
of a large estate must always feel uncertain 

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whether his fields and woods will remain 
in the possession of his family. In the 
neighborhood of large cities almost the 
only way to make sure that an estate, 
which the owner has greatly improved by 
his own thoughtfulness and skill, will re- 
main in good condition is to get the estate 
converted into a public domain. On an 
estate which becomes public property the 
chances are that all improvements will be 
maintained and that care will be taken to 
preserve all its landscape beauties. It is 
only a generous and public-spirited man, 
however, who looks forward with satisfac- 
tion to this fate for fields and forests which 
have become dear to him. 



THE HIGHER OPPORTUNITIES OF 
WEALTH 

In some exceptional cases a rich man 
uses his riches in pursuit of intellectual 
satisfactions of his own, for the full attain- 
ment of which riches are necessary, but 
which are in no way connected with his 
capacity for accumulating property. Such 

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a fortunate rich man, having acquired great 
wealth, uses it to meet the costs of his 
own scientific investigations, or in acquir- 
ing a fine library on a subject to which 
he had devoted himself before he was 
rich ; or he retires somewhat early in life 
from money-making and gives himself to 
study and authorship with every aid or 
facility which money can procure. These 
are the most fortunate of rich men. They 
obtain congenial intellectual satisfactions. 
They make themselves serviceable, and 
they have a better chance than most rich 
men of bringing up serviceable children. 

It is obvious that very rich men have 
power to render services to the public 
which it is impossible for poor men or men 
of moderate incomes to render. They can 
endow churches, schools, universities, li- 
braries, hospitals, museums, gardens, and 
parks with sums large enough to give 
these institutions stability and continuous 
usefulness. They can also come to the 
aid of private individuals who have suf- 
fered through illness, premature death of 
friends, or other disasters which justify 

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helplessness. They can help widows and 
children bereft of their natural protectors 
and bread-winners. They can help young 
men and women to an education which will 
raise for the persons helped the whole 
level of their subsequent lives. All these 
things they can do on a scale impossible 
to men of moderate means. Great riches 
are constantly used in our country in all 
these ways to an extent which has never 
before been equalled, and which entitles 
the American very rich man to be recog- 
nized as a type by himself. 

The first question which arises about 
this beneficial use of great wealth is this : 
Does it give pleasure or satisfaction to 
the givers ; and is this pleasure or satis- 
faction, if any, proportionate to the mag- 
nitude of the gifts ? Does a man who 
gives $100,000 to a college or an academy 
get more pleasure from his gift than a 
man who gives $1,000, the first man be- 
ing one hundred times richer than the 
second man ? That there is real pleasure 
or satisfaction for the giver in his giving 
is altogether probable ; and it is quite 

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possible that the pleasure in large giving 
is proportionate to that largeness, although 
the pleasure of acquisition is not propor- 
tionate to the amount acquired. Experi- 
ence seems to show that it is difficult for 
a very rich man to give away intelligently 
and with enjoyment as large a proportion 
of his income as a man in moderate cir- 
cumstances can easily give away. The 
proportion of an income given away ought 
to mount rapidly with the increase of the 
income, but experience indicates that it 
does not. It is no easy task to select 
wisely objects for great benefactions and to 
give money to the selected objects without 
doing injury. Thus, to endow a church, 
unless with its building and equipment 
only, is generally a mischief, not a benefit. 
The giving of thoroughly good things, like 
education and opportunities for travel or 
healthful exercise, to young people who are 
not bound to the giver by ties of kinship is 
accompanied by great difficulties. It is easy 
to pauperize the individuals helped. It is 
easy to destroy their self-reliance and their 
capacity for productive labor. 

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GIVING BY MEN OF WEALTH 

Very rich men differ greatly with re- 
gard to their method of giving. Some 
give quickly, with slight investigation con- 
cerning the objects to which they give. 
Others make the most careful and thor- 
ough investigation before making gifts, 
employing experienced agents in their in- 
quiries, and ascertaining the merits and 
demerits, the advantages and disadvan- 
tages, of the institution or society they 
think to aid. Some men of great wealth 
approach the whole subject of giving away 
money with conscientiousness and with a 
painful sense of responsibility for the use 
of wealth entrusted to them ; and this 
sense of responsibility may greatly impair 
their comfort or satisfaction in the power 
to give. Other men, no richer, give away 
great sums without serious examination 
and without any oppressive sense that 
they hold their property in trust for the 
benefit of the community. One anxiety, 
which most conscientious givers on a large 

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scale feel, is the anxiety lest, by coming 
with large gifts to the support of an insti- 
tution or association, they impair what 
may be called the natural or constitutional 
resources of the institution or association 
— such, for example, as the giving power 
of the alumni of a college or the yield of 
the annual taxes or subscriptions in a 
church. It is commonly dangerous for 
a school, or college, or library to get the 
reputation of being the special charge of 
a very rich individual or family. On this 
account givers of large sums often make 
it a condition of their gifts that some 
other sum shall be procured simultane- 
ously from other friends of the institution. 
Every very rich man who is in the habit 
of making gifts to individuals and to insti- 
tutions has met, in many instances, with 
a complete or partial defeat of his benevo- 
lent purpose; but most of these defeats 
or failures occur in attempts to aid indi- 
viduals rather than institutions. 

The nineteenth century witnessed a con- 
siderable change in the destination of 
endowments. Endowments for palliating 

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some of the evils that afflict society used to 
be the commonest, such as endowments for 
almshouses, doles, and hospitals ; but now 
endowments for various sorts of education 
— such as academies, colleges, free-lecture 
courses, libraries, and museums supply — 
have become the commonest; and these 
last forms are far the wisest, because they 
are much more than palliations of evil. 
They are creators and difFusers of good. 
Through this change the chance of the 
very rich man to do perpetual good with 
his money has been greatly increased ; and 
surely the hope of doing some perpetual 
good with the product of one's intelli- 
gence, skill, and industry is one of the 
brightest of human hopes. 

THE CHILDREN OF THE VERY RICH 

The most serious disadvantage under 
which very rich people labor is in the 
bringing up of their children. It is well- 
nigh impossible for a very rich man to 
defend his children from habits of self- 
indulgence, laziness, and selfishness. The 

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children are so situated, both at home and 
at school, that they have no opportunity 
of acquiring any habit of productive labor. 
They do nothing for themselves, or for 
their parents and brothers and sisters. 
They, have no means of acquiring the 
habit of co-operative work except in their 
sports, and in not all of those. The 
farmer's children co-operate from their 
tenderest years in the work of the house- 
hold and the farm. The very rich man's 
child is absolutely deprived of that in- 
valuable training. Moreover, the artifi- 
cial training which a very rich man can 
buy in the market for his child is deter- 
mined as to its quality, not by his own 
intelligence and wishes, but by what for- 
mer generations have produced in the way 
of educational institutions and private tui- 
tion. The rich man can find no better 
school for his boy and girl than has been 
developed without his aid, and mostly by 
a preceding generation. When the multi- 
millionaire comes to realize that he wants 
something for his child which the institu- 
tions of his time do not furnish, he can 

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help to improve the defective institutions 
for the benefit of other people's children 
in subsequent years, but it is too late to 
improve them for his own children. The 
very rich man's sons know, first, that they 
will have no need of earning their living ; 
secondly, that their father can, if he choose, 
enable them to marry early, and to con- 
tinue to live, without any exertion on their 
part, in the same luxurious way in which 
they have always lived in their father's 
house ; thirdly, that mental exertion will 
be as unnecessary for them as physical 
exertion. They are therefore deprived of 
all the ordinary motives for industry and 
the assiduous cultivation of their powers, 
bodily and mental. Further, it is almost 
impossible to bring them up to a simple 
habit of life which takes account of the 
feelings and interests of others. Unless 
disciplined by ill-health or other personal 
misfortunes, they almost inevitably become 
self-indulgent and unambitious. This con- 
dition of a rich man's children is worse 
in the democratic society of the United 
States than in the older aristocratic socie- 

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ties of Europe, because here no duties or 
responsibilities are inherited with their 
riches by the rich man's children. The 
children of the rich have with us no duties 
to the state, and no recognized duties to 
their family, or even to the creator of 
their wealth. They are not even bound 
to maintain their father's establishment. 
They are placed under no obligation to 
live where their father did, to carry on his 
business, to maintain his benefactions, or 
to build on any foundations which he 
laid. When property consists of stocks 
and bonds, almost all the safeguards with 
which feudal society surrounded the trans- 
mission of titles and great estates from 
father to son fail to take effect. 

The very rich man who succeeds, as 
some do succeed, in bringing up his chil- 
dren to useful and honorable careers of 
their own, has had, then, enormous diffi- 
culties to overcome. He can only over- 
come them through the influence of his 
own personal character, quite apart from 
the qualities which made him very rich. 
He must possess for himself, and inspire 

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in his children, nobler ambitions than that 
of being very rich. He must have a high 
purpose in the use of riches, which his 
children can see and learn to imitate ; and 
the convincing proof that he himself was 
possessed by a noble purpose will be the 
fact that his children escape the great 
dangers of being brought up rich, and de- 
velop a correspondingly high purpose in 
their own lives. There are, of course, 
many cases among the children of the rich 
where the parents' nature is not trans- 
mitted to the children, very unlike ten- 
dencies appearing in the children from 
any that the parents exhibited, as when 
scholarly children with artistic, literary, or 
scientific tastes appear in the families of 
uneducated parents whose practical sagac- 
ity and industry have made them rich. 
The impossibility of bringing up children 
satisfactorily in luxurious homes has led to 
the establishment of boarding schools of 
various sorts for the children of the rich ; 
and these schools have steadily increased 
in number and variety during the past 
thirty years. They are more necessary 

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for boys than for girls, because the nature 
of boys is more perverted by luxury than 
the nature of girls, perhaps because enter- 
prise and ambition seem more indispen- 
sable in a man than in a woman. It seems 
to be easier to make a boy selfish and in- 
different to the feelings and rights of 
others than to spoil a girl in that way. 

The effects which very rich people have 
on their fellowmen are various, being 
much affected by the personal qualities of 
the possessors of great wealth and by the 
popular beliefs as to the sources of their 
wealth. The multitude recognize that 
they themselves are strongly influenced by 
the very same hopes and desires which 
have been gratified in the case of posses- 
sors of great wealth. In a democracy 
nearly every man and woman wishes and 
hopes to earn more and more money, 
and to lay up more and more money, and 
so to become more and more independent 
of the anxiety which inevitably accompa- 
nies dependence on daily toil to meet daily 
wants. Moreover, nearly every man and 
woman admires and respects those abilities 

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which make men rich, — acquisitiveness, 
frugality, industry, and business sagacity, 
— so that they are prepared to admire and 
respect those who possess in a high degree 
these qualities. On the other hand, the 
multitude is disposed to despise and con- 
demn the self-indulgence and the luxury 
which degrade and corrupt the possessors 
of great riches, together with their children 
and their dependents. The multitude 
feels a mild reprobation of extravagance, 
but a hearty contempt for penuriousness 
and lack of generosity in the very rich. 
It always experiences, and often expresses, 
a displeased surprise when a man who has 
lived without generosity and without splen- 
dor is discovered at his death to have been 
very rich. This is a kind of adverse post- 
humous judgment which never overtook 
the very rich in the earlier days when all 
property was visible, as in land, buildings, 
flocks, herds, and chattels. Not even gen- 
erous testamentary dispositions will recon- 
cile the American public to a penurious 
life on the part of a rich man. 

I "43 ] 



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PUBLIC JUDGMENTS OF THE RICH 

The judgments of the public concerning 
the means by which great riches have been 
acquired are fickle and uncertain, because, 
for the most part, made in the dark. In 
this respect the public has little confidence 
in its own impressions, unless legal pro- 
ceedings have brought to light the course 
of conduct and events which profited the 
possessors of great wealth, or the habitual 
mode of conducting the business which 
yielded great wealth. In spite of the fact 
that monopolies have for centuries been 
hateful to the main body of the consumers 
in every nation, the judgment of the pub- 
lic is ordinarily a lenient one toward the 
creators of successful monopolies ; because 
every one recognizes in himself a longing 
to secure some sort of monopoly — to be- 
come the possessor, for example, of some 
little art or little skill which nobody else 
possesses, to raise a vegetable or a flower 
which nobody else can raise, to write a 
book or paint a picture which nobody else 

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can produce, to practise a trade or a pro- 
fession without any effective competitors, 
or to invent or manufacture a patented ar- 
ticle which nobody else can make. The 
manufacture of a patented article affords a 
perfect example of monopoly ; but the 
American people, at least, are thoroughly 
accustomed to such perfect monopolies, 
and, on the whole, believe them to be 
suitable rewards for beneficial inventions. 
In spite, therefore, of the evils caused to 
the great body of consumers by monopo- 
lies, the American public is gentle in its 
judgment of the conduct of very rich men 
who have discerned and profited enor- 
mously by advantages in business which 
nobody else could or did procure. Al- 
most every business man feels that if he 
had had the skill, or the luck, to seize upon 
some such advantage, he would not have 
hesitated to do so. A community which 
is thoroughly possessed in all its strata 
with a desire and a purpose to better itself 
is not likely to be harsh in its judgment 
of men who have conspicuously succeeded 
in so doing. To be sure, if a very rich 

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man in pursuing the gratification of his 
own desires interferes with what his neigh- 
bors regard as their own traditional rights 
and customs, as, for instance, by enclosing 
large areas over which his neighbors have 
freely fished or hunted, or by occupying 
shores which have been open to the resort 
of a whole neighborhood, he is apt to 
encounter popular condemnation. If he 
pursues his pleasures with conspicuous 
disregard of the comfort or safety of other 
people he is likely to get into trouble, un- 
less, as is often the case, he can manage in 
his pursuit of his own pleasures to appear to 
be only enjoying, or perhaps defending, val- 
uable rights acquired by the whole public. 



THE WORLD'S ATTITUDE TOWARD 
RICH MEN 

In the long run the possessor of great 
wealth is judged in part by the use he 
makes of his riches, including in that use 
his disposal of them at his death, in part 
by the nature of the business which made 
him rich, and in part by the moral quality 

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he manifests in the conduct of his business. 
If it appears that the rich man recognized 
his responsibility to society for a right use 
of his wealth, the public will forgive much 
expenditure for his own pleasures and for 
the pleasures of his family, and for the se- 
curity of his children against the possibility 
of future want. They will condone great 
extravagance and waste, if, on the whole, a 
high and liberal purpose guided the man 
in his accumulations and in his benefac- 
tions. The peculiar faculties and powers 
which lead to the accumulation of riches 
resemble all other human faculties and 
powers in the following respect, — they 
may all be degraded and made sordid by 
a low purpose or elevated and exalted by 
a noble one. This is just as true of the 
powers of memory, invention, and pene- 
trative reasoning as it is of that practical 
sagacity which leads to the possession of 
wealth. Even love, that all-hallowing 
motive when it is pure, unselfish, and spir- 
itual, becomes a fearful implement of moral 
destruction if it be low and animal. The 
very rich man is, then, not to be pro- 

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nounced admirable and happy, or con- 
temptible and miserable, until his account 
is made up and the dominant purpose of 
his life is made plain. 

Again, the rich man is judged in part 
by the quality of the product which made 
him rich. A beneficial product tends to 
sanctify riches ; a harmful product poisons 
them. The public judgment is gentler 
toward men who got rich by producing or 
selling good petroleum, steel, or copper 
than it is toward men who produce or sell 
whiskey, patent medicines, lottery tickets, 
or advertising space for immoral undertak- 
ings. Riches acquired in making mankind 
more comfortable or healthier are much 
more likely to give satisfaction to their 
possessor, and through him to benefit so- 
ciety, than riches acquired through products 
which are injurious to mankind and so 
increase the sum of human misery. 

PUBLICITY A SAFEGUARD FOR WEALTH 

In regard to judging the morality of the 
processes by which great wealth has been 

[ h8 ] 



GREAT RICHES 

acquired the public must always meet with 
serious difficulties and delays ; proof of 
misconduct is hard to get, and even the 
courts sometimes give an uncertain sound, 
for business methods which are not illegal 
may nevertheless be decidedly immoral ; 
for instance, they may be cruel, greedy, or 
treacherous, but within the law. Bought 
suppressions of truth, which in the public 
interest should be told, are usually im- 
moral but not illegal. The only sure pro- 
tection of the rich man against suspicions 
and adverse judgments in this respect is 
publicity for his methods and results. 
Many businesses are now under sufficient 
government supervision to secure some 
measure of publicity; those conducted in 
secrecy and with no periodic publication of 
results are liable to intense suspicion on 
the part of the public whenever they yield 
immense fortunes for individuals at short 
notice. In such cases the public always 
suspects some sort of foul play or some 
unearned increment not fairly attributable 
to unusual foresight. The suddenly rich 
man finds that the presumptions are all 

[ H9 ] 



GREAT RICHES 

against him in the public mind, and that 
the public ear is open to the prosecuting 
attorney but shut to the defence. This 
distrust is the inevitable penalty for secrecy 
in money getting on a large scale. Many 
years may elapse before it is possible to 
get the final verdict, and oblivion may 
easily arrive before justice. 

The very rich people, then, like most 
other things and forces in this world, are a 
mixed product, and may work either good 
or evil for their neighborhood and their 
nation. Some of them do great harm 
by giving conspicuous examples of self- 
indulgent, pleasure-seeking, trivial lives ; 
others do great good by illustrating the 
noble and beneficent use of wealth. Some 
of them, in seeking their selfish ends, 
corrupt legislatures and courts, trample on 
the weak, betray trusts, cheat the law, de- 
ceive or bribe the agents of the law, raise 
the prices of necessaries of life, and by their 
example lower the moral standards of the 
business community ; others use all their 
influence to improve legislation, the ad- 
ministration of justice, the management 

1 150 ] 



GREAT RICHES 

of corporations — including that of towns 
and cities — the execution of trusts, and 
the education of the people, and to diffuse 
and cheapen the good gifts of nature. The 
estimate which the rest of us form of the 
relatively few very rich men is guided 
by our opinions concerning their personal 
characters. We despise and abhor the 
coarse, ostentatious, selfish, unjust multi- 
millionaire, while we admire and respect 
the refined, generous, and just rich man, 
be his millions few or many, be his bene- 
factions direct through gifts to hospitals, 
churches, and colleges, or indirect through 
the improvement of the industries which 
maintain and extend civilization or the 
beautification of the common life. 

NO ABIDING CLASS OF RICH MEN 

It is quite unnecessary in this country 
to feel alarm about the rise of a permanent 
class of very rich people. To transmit 
great estates is hard. They get divided 
or dispersed. The heirs are often unable 
to keep their inherited treasures, or, if by 

1 151 ] 



GREAT RICHES 

the help of lawyers and other hired agents 
they manage to keep them, they cease to 
accumulate, and only spend. This is one 
of the natural effects on his children of 
the very rich man's mode of life. With 
rarest exceptions the very rich men of 
to-day are not the sons of the very rich 
men of thirty years ago, but are new men. 
It will be the same thirty years hence. 
The wise rich father will try to put his 
sons into those beneficent professions and 
occupations which have strong intellectual 
and moral interest, and in which pecuni- 
ary independence is a distinct advantage. 
Such are the public service in elective or 
appointive offices, the ministry, scientific 
research, social service, and the manage- 
ment of charities and of serviceable 
endowed institutions. Inherited wealth 
enables young men to devote themselves 
early to these fine employments, which are 
not pecuniarily remunerative but yet pos- 
sess the highest sort of interest and offer 
all the rewards of beneficent influence 
among men. From persons so occupied, 
from the ranks of the learned and scientific 

C 15* ] 



GREAT RICHES 

professions, and from the more intellectual 
and useful sorts of business, the highest 
class of each generation in a democracy is 
in large measure recruited. The new-made 
very rich may or may not belong to this 
class. The chances are against them, un- 
less they prove themselves men of distinc- 
tion both mentally and morally. 

One of the best tests of the worth of 
free institutions is their capacity to produce 
a numerous class of superior persons — 
rich, well-off, comfortable, or just self- 
supporting — a class larger in proportion 
to the mass of the people, and more meri- 
torious than any other form of government 
has produced. All signs indicate that the 
American democracy will meet this test. 



[ 153 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 



A lecture delivered at the close of the Eleventh 

Session of the Harvard Summer School 

of Theology, July 22, ipop 



THE RELIGION OF THE 
FUTURE 

AS students in this summer's School 
of Theology you have attended a 
series of lectures on fluctuations in religious 
interest, on the frequent occurrence of 
religious declines followed soon by recov- 
eries or regenerations both within and 
without the churches, on the frequent at- 
tempts to bring the prevalent religious 
doctrines into harmony with new tenden- 
cies in the intellectual world, on the con- 
stant struggle between conservatism and 
liberalism in existing churches and between 
idealism and materialism in society at 
large, on the effects of popular education 
and the modern spirit of inquiry on re- 
ligious doctrines and organizations, on the 
changed views of thinking people con- 
cerning the nature of the world and of 
man, on the increase of knowledge as 

[ 157 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

affecting religion, and on the new ideas 
of God. You have also listened to 
lectures on psychotherapy, a new develop- 
ment of an ancient tendency to mix religion 
with medicine, and on the theory of evo- 
lution, a modern scientific doctrine which 
within fifty years has profoundly modified 
the religious conceptions and expectations 
of many thinking people. You have 
heard, too, how the new ideas of democ- 
racy and social progress have modified 
and ought to modify not only the actual 
work done by the churches, but the whole 
conception of the function of churches. 
Again, you have heard how many and 
how profound are the religious implica- 
tions in contemporary philosophy. Your 
attention has been called to the most 
recent views concerning the conservation 
of energy in the universe, to the wonder- 
ful phenomena of radio-activity, and to 
the most recent definitions of atom, mole- 
cule, ion, and electron — human imagin- 
ings which have much to do with the 
modern conceptions of matter and spirit. 
The influence on popular religion of 

1 158 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

modern scholarship applied to the New 
Testament has also engaged your atten- 
tion ; and, finally, you have heard an 
exposition of religious conditions and 
practices in the United States which 
assumed an intimate connection between 
the advance of civilization and the con- 
temporaneous aspects of religions, and 
illustrated from history the service of 
religion — and particularly of Christianity 
— to the progress of civilization through 
its contributions to individual freedom, in- 
tellectual culture, and social co-operation. 
The general impression you have re- 
ceived from this comprehensive survey 
must surely be that religion is not a fixed, 
but a fluent thing. It is, therefore, wholly 
natural and to be expected that the con- 
ceptions of religion prevalent among edu- 
cated people should change from century 
to century. Modern studies in compara- 
tive religion and in the history of religions 
demonstrate that such has been the case 
in times past. Now the nineteenth cen- 
tury immeasurably surpassed all preceding 
centuries in the increase of knowledge, and 

[ 159] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

in the spread of the spirit of scientific in- 
quiry and of the passion for truth-seeking. 
Hence the changes in religious beliefs and 
practices, and in the relation of churches 
to human society as a whole, were much 
deeper and more extensive in that century 
than ever before in the history of the 
world ; and the approach made to the em- 
bodiment in the actual practices of man- 
kind of the doctrines of the greatest 
religious teachers was more significant and 
more rapid than ever before. The religion 
of a multitude of humane persons in the 
twentieth century may, therefore, be called 
without inexcusable exaggeration a " new 
religion," — not that a single one of its 
doctrines and practices is really new in 
essence, but only that the wider acceptance 
and better actual application of truths 
familiar in the past at many times and 
places, but never taken to heart by the 
multitude or put in force on a large scale, 
are new. I shall attempt to state without 
reserve and in simplest terms free from 
technicalities, first, what the religion of 
the future seems likely not to be, and, 

[ 160 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

secondly, what it may reasonably be ex- 
pected to be. My point of view is that 
of an American layman, whose observing 
and thinking life has covered the extraor- 
dinary period since the Voyage of the 
Beagle was published, anaesthesia and the 
telegraph came into use, Herbert Spencer 
issued his first series of papers on evo- 
lution, Kuenen, Robertson Smith, and 
Wellhausen developed and vindicated 
Biblical criticism, J. S. Mill's Principles of 
Political Economy appeared, and the United 
States by going to war with Mexico set 
in operation the forces which abolished 
slavery on the American continent — the 
period within which mechanical power 
came to be widely distributed through the 
explosive engine and the applications of 
electricity, and all the great fundamental 
industries of civilized mankind were re- 
constructed. 

i. The religion of the future will not 
be based on authority, either spiritual or 
temporal. The decline of the reliance 
upon absolute authority is one of the most 
significant phenomena of the modern 
» [ 161 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

world. This decline is to be seen every- 
where, — in government, in education, in 
the church, in business, and in the family. 
The present generation is willing, and 
indeed often eager, to be led ; but it is 
averse to being driven, and it wants to 
understand the grounds and sanctions of 
authoritative decisions. As a rule, the 
Christian churches, Roman, Greek, and 
Protestant, have heretofore relied mainly 
upon the principle of authority, the 
Reformation having substituted for an 
authoritative church an authoritative 
book ; but it is evident that the authority 
both of the most authoritative churches 
and of the Bible as a verbally inspired 
guide is already greatly impaired, and that 
the tendency towards liberty is progressive, 
and among educated men irresistible. 

i. It is hardly necessary to say that in 
the religion of the future there will be no 
personifications of the primitive forces of 
nature, such as light, fire, frost, wind, 
storm, and earthquake, although primitive 
religions and the actual religions of bar- 
barous or semi-civilized peoples abound in 

1 162 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

such personifications. The mountains, 
groves, volcanoes, and oceans will no 
longer be inhabited by either kindly or 
malevolent deities ; although man will still 
look to the hills for rest, still find in the 
ocean a symbol of infinity, and refresh- 
ment and delight in the forests and the 
streams. The love of nature mounts and 
spreads, while faith in fairies, imps, 
nymphs, demons, and angels declines and 
fades away. 

3. There will be in the religion of the 
future no worship, express or implied, of 
dead ancestors, teachers, or rulers ; no 
more tribal, racial, or tutelary gods ; no 
identification of any human being, how- 
ever majestic in character, with the Eternal 
Deity. In these respects the religion of 
the future will not be essentially new, 
for nineteen centuries ago Jesus said, 
" Neither in this mountain, nor in Jeru- 
salem, shall ye worship the Father. . . . 
God is a Spirit ; and they that worship 
him must worship in spirit and truth." 
It should be recognized, however, first, that 
Christianity was soon deeply affected by 

[ 163] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

the surrounding paganism, and that some 
of these pagan intrusions have survived to 
this day ; and, secondly, that the Hebrew 
religion, the influence of which on the 
Christian has been, and is, very potent, 
was in the highest degree a racial religion, 
and its Holy of Holies was local. In 
war-times, that is, in times when the brutal 
or savage instincts remaining in humanity 
become temporarily dominant, and good- 
will is limited to people of the same 
nation, the survival of a tribal or national 
quality in institutional Christianity comes 
out very plainly. The aid of the Lord 
of Hosts is still invoked by both parties to 
international warfare, and each side praises 
and thanks Him for its successes. Indeed, 
the same spirit has often been exhibited in 
civil wars caused by religious differences. 



u 



Now glory to the Lord of Hosts, from whom 

all glories are ! 
And glory to our sovereign liege, King Henry 

of Navarre ! " 



It is not many years since an Archbishop 
of Canterbury caused thanks to be given 

1 16 4 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

in all Anglican churches that the Lord of 
Hosts had been in the English camp over 
against the Egyptians. Heretofore the 
great religions of the world have held out 
hopes of direct interventions of the deity, 
or some special deity, in favor of his faith- 
ful worshippers. It was the greatest of 
Jewish prophets who told King Hezekiah 
that the King of Assyria, who had ap- 
proached Jerusalem with a great army, 
should not come into the city nor shoot 
an arrow there, and reported the Lord as 
saying, " I will defend this city to save it, 
for my own sake, and for my servant 
David's sake." "And it came to pass 
that night, that the angel of the Lord 
went forth, and smote in the camp of the 
Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five 
thousand : and when men arose early in 
the morning, behold, they were all dead 
corpses." The new religion cannot 
promise that sort of aid to either nations 
or individuals in peril. 

4. In the religious life of the future the 
primary object will not be the personal 
welfare or safety of the individual in this 

[ 165] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

world or any other. That safety, that 
welfare or salvation, may be incidentally 
secured, but it will not be the prime object 
in view. The religious person will not 
think of his own welfare or security, but of 
service to others, and of contributions to 
the common good. The new religion will 
not teach that character is likely to be 
suddenly changed, either in this world or 
in any other, — although in any world a 
sudden opportunity for improvement may 
present itself, and the date of that oppor- 
tunity may be a precious remembrance. 
The new religion will not rely on either a 
sudden conversion in this world or a sud- 
den paradise in the next, from out a sen- 
sual, selfish, or dishonest life. It will 
teach that repentance wipes out nothing in 
* the past, and is only the first step towards 
reformation, and a sign of a better future. 
5. The religion of the future will not 
be propitiatory, sacrificial, or expiatory. 
In primitive society fear of the supernal 
powers, as represented in the awful forces 
of nature, was the root of religion. These 
dreadful powers must be propitiated or 

[ 166 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

placated, and they must be propitiated by 
sacrifices in the most literal sense ; and 
the supposed offences of man must be ex- 
piated by sufferings, which were apt to be 
vicarious. Even the Hebrews offered hu- 
man sacrifices for generations ; and always 
a great part of their religious rites consisted 
in sacrifices of animals. The Christian 
church made a great step forward when it 
substituted the burning of incense for the 
burning of bullocks and doves ; but to 
this day there survives not only in the 
doctrines but in the practices of the Chris- 
tian church the principle of expiatory sac- 
rifice. It will be an immense advance if 
twentieth-century Christianity can be puri- 
fied from all these survivals of barbarous, 
or semi-barbarous, religious conceptions ; 
because they imply such an unworthy idea 
of God. 

6. The religion of the future will not 
perpetuate the Hebrew anthropomorphic 
representations of God, conceptions which 
were carried in large measure into institu- 
tional Christianity. It will not think of 
God as an enlarged and glorified man, who 

1 167 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

walks " in the garden in the cool of the 
day/' or as a judge deciding between hu- 
man litigants, or as a king, Pharaoh, or 
emperor, ruling arbitrarily his subjects, or 
as the patriarch who, in the early history 
of the race, ruled his family absolutely. 
These human functions will cease to rep- 
resent adequately the attributes of God. 
The nineteenth century has made all these 
conceptions of deity look archaic and 
crude. 

7. The religion of the future will not 
be gloomy, ascetic, or maledictory. It 
will not deal chiefly with sorrow and death, 
but with joy and life. It will not care so 
much to account for the evil and the ugly 
in the world as to interpret the good and 
the beautiful. It will believe in no malig- 
nant powers — neither in Satan nor in 
witches, neither in the evil eye nor in the 
malign suggestion. When its disciple en- 
counters a wrong or evil in the world, his 
impulse will be to search out its origin, 
source, or cause, that he may attack it at 
its starting-point. He may not speculate 
on the origin of evil in general, but will 

[ 168 3 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

surely try to discover the best way to 
eradicate the particular evil or wrong he 
has recognized. 

Having thus considered what the relig- 
ion of the future will not be, let us now 
consider what its positive elements will be. 

The new thought of God will be its 
most characteristic element. This ideal 
will comprehend the Jewish Jehovah, the 
Christian Universal Father, the modern 
physicist's omnipresent and exhaustless 
Energy, and the biological conception of a 
Vital Force. The Infinite Spirit pervades 
the universe, just as the spirit of a man 
pervades his body, and acts, consciously 
or unconsciously, in every atom of it. 
The twentieth century will accept literally 
and implicitly St. Paul's statement, cc In 
Him we live, and move, and have our be- 
ing," and God is that vital atmosphere, or 
incessant inspiration. The new religion 
is therefore thoroughly monotheistic, its 
God being the one infinite force ; but this 
one God is not withdrawn or removed, 
but indwelling, and especially dwelling in 
every living creature. God is so absolutely 

[ i6 9 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

immanent in all things, animate and inani- 
mate, that no mediation is needed between 
him and the least particle of his creation. 
In his moral attributes, he is for every 
man the multiplication to infinity of all 
the noblest, tenderest, and most potent 
qualities which that man has ever seen or 
imagined in a human being. In this sense 
every man makes his own picture of God. 
Every age, barbarous or civilized, happy 
or unhappy, improving or degenerating, 
frames its own conception of God within 
the limits of its own experiences and im- 
aginings. In this sense, too, a humane 
religion has to wait for a humane genera- 
tion. The central thought of the new re- 
ligion will therefore be a humane and 
worthy idea of God, thoroughly consistent 
with the nineteenth-century revelations 
concerning man and nature, and with all 
the tenderest and loveliest teachings which 
have come down to us from the past. 

The scientific doctrine of one omnipres- 
ent, eternal Energy, informing and inspir- 
ing the whole creation at every instant of 
time and throughout the infinite spaces, is 

[ 170 1 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

fundamentally and completely inconsistent 
with the dualistic conception which sets 
spirit over against matter, good over 
against evil, man's wickedness against 
God's righteousness, and Satan against 
Christ. The doctrine of God's imma- 
nence is also inconsistent with the con- 
ception that he once set the universe 
a-going, and then withdrew, leaving the 
universe to be operated under physical 
laws, which were his vicegerents or substi- 
tutes. If God is thoroughly immanent in 
the entire creation, there can be no <c sec- 
ondary causes," in either the material or 
the spiritual universe. The new religion 
rejects absolutely the conception that man 
is an alien in the world, or that God is 
alienated from the world. It rejects also 
the entire conception of man as a fallen 
being, hopelessly wicked, and tending 
downward by nature ; and it makes this 
emphatic rejection of long-accepted beliefs 
because it finds them all inconsistent with 
a humane, civilized, or worthy idea of 
God. 
If, now, man discovers God through 

[ 171 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

self-consciousness, or, in other words, if it 
is the human soul through which God is 
revealed, the race has come to the knowl- 
edge of God through knowledge of itself; 
and the best knowledge of God comes 
through knowledge of the best of the race. 
Men have always attributed to man a spirit 
distinct from his body, though immanent 
in it. No one of us is willing to identify 
himself with his body ; but on the con- 
trary every one now believes, and all men 
have believed, that there is in a man an 
animating, ruling, characteristic essence, 
or spirit, which is himself. This spirit, 
dull or bright, petty or grand, pure or 
foul, looks out of the eyes, sounds in the 
voice, and appears in the bearing and 
manners of each individual. It is some- 
thing just as real as the body, and more 
characteristic. To every influential person 
it gives far the greater part of his power. 
It is what we call the personality. This 
spirit, or soul, is the most effective part of 
every human being, and is recognized as 
such, and always has been. It can use a 
fine body more effectively than it can a 

[ 172 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

poor body, but it can do wonders through 
an inadequate body. In the crisis of a 
losing battle it is a human soul that rallies 
the flying troops. It looks out of flashing 
eyes, and speaks in ringing tones, but its 
appeal is to other souls, and not to other 
bodies. In the midst of terrible natural 
catastrophes, — earthquakes, storms, con- 
flagrations, volcanic eruptions, — when 
men's best works are being destroyed and 
thousands of lives are ceasing suddenly 
and horribly, it is not a few especially good 
human bodies which steady the survivors, 
maintain order, and organize the forces of 
rescue and relief. It is a few superior 
souls. The leading men and women in 
any society, savage or civilized, are the 
strongest personalities, — the personality 
being primarily spiritual, and only second- 
arily bodily. Recognizing to the full 
these simple and obvious facts, the future 
religion will pay homage to all righteous 
and loving persons who in the past have 
exemplified, and made intelligible to their 
contemporaries, intrinsic goodness and 
effluent good-will. It will be an all-saints 

[ 173 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

religion. It will treasure up all tales of 
human excellence and virtue. It will rev- 
erence the discoverers, teachers, martyrs, 
and apostles of liberty, purity, and right- 
eousness. It will respect and honor all 
strong and lovely human beings, — seeing 
in them in finite measure qualities similar 
to those which they adore in God. Rec- 
ognizing in every great and lovely human 
person individual will-power which is the 
essence of the personality, it will naturally 
and inevitably attribute to God a similar 
individual will-power, the essence of his 
infinite personality. In this simple and 
natural faith there will be no place for 
metaphysical complexities or magical rites, 
much less for obscure dogmas, the result 
of compromises in turbulent conventions. 
It is anthropomorphic ; but what else can 
a human view of God's personality be ? 
The finite can study and describe the in- 
finite only through analogy, parallelism, 
and simile ; but that is a good way. The 
new religion will animate and guide ordi- 
nary men and women who are putting into 
practice religious conceptions which result 

C 174 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

directly from their own observation and 
precious experience of tenderness, sym- 
pathy, trust, and solemn joy. It will be 
most welcome to the men and women who 
cherish and exhibit incessant, all-compre- 
hending good-will. These are the "good" 
people. These are the only genuinely 
civilized persons. 

To the wretched, sick, and downtrodden 
of the earth, religion has in the past held 
out hopes of future compensation. When 
precious ties of affection have been broken, 
religion has held out prospects of immedi- 
ate and eternal blessings for the departed, 
and has promised happy reunions in an- 
other and a better world. To a human 
soul, lodged in an imperfect, feeble, or 
suffering body, some of the older religions 
have held out the expectation of deliver- 
ance by death, and of entrance upon a rich, 
competent, and happy life, — in short, for 
present human ills, however crushing, the 
widely accepted religions have offered 
either a second life, presumably immortal, 
under the happiest conditions, or at least 
peace, rest, and a happy oblivion. Can 

[ i75 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

the future religion promise that sort of 
compensation for the ills of this world any 
more than it can promise miraculous aid 
against threatened disaster ? A candid 
reply to this inquiry involves the state- 
ment that in the future religion there will 
be nothing cc supernatural." This does 
not mean that life will be stripped of mys- 
tery or wonder, or that the range of natural 
law has been finally determined; but that 
religion, like all else, must conform to 
natural law so far as the range of law has 
been determined. In this sense the relig- 
ion of the future will be a natural religion. 
In all its theory and all its practice it will 
be completely natural. It will place no 
reliance on any sort of magic, or miracle, 
or other violation of, or exception to, the 
laws of nature. It will perform no magi- 
cal rites, use no occult processes, count 
on no abnormal interventions of supernal 
powers, and admit no possession of super- 
natural gifts, whether transmitted or con- 
ferred, by any tribe, class, or family of 
men. Its sacraments will be, not invasions 
of law by miracle, but the visible signs of 

■ c 176 i 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

a natural spiritual grace, or of a natural 
hallowed custom. It may preserve histori- 
cal rites and ceremonies, which, in times 
past, have represented the expectation of 
magical or miraculous effects; but it will 
be content with natural interpretations of 
such rites and ceremonies. Its priests will 
be men especially interested in religious 
thought, possessing unusual gifts of speech 
on devotional subjects, and trained in the 
best methods of improving the social and 
industrial conditions of human life. There 
will always be need of such public teachers 
and spiritual leaders, heralds, and prophets. 
It should be observed, however, that many 
happenings and processes which were 
formerly regarded as supernatural have, 
with the increase of knowledge, come to 
be regarded as completely natural. The 
line between the supposed natural and 
the supposed supernatural is, therefore, not 
fixed but changeable. 

It is obvious, therefore, that the com- 
pletely natural quality of the future relig- 
ion excludes from it many of the religious 
compensations and consolations of the 

[ 177 1 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

past. Twentieth-century soldiers, going 
into battle, will not be able to say to each 
other, as Moslem soldiers did in the tenth 
century, " If we are killed to-day, we shall 
meet again to-night in Paradise." Even 
now, the mother who loses her babe, or 
the husband his wife, by a preventable 
disease, is seldom able to say simply, " It 
is the will of God! The babe — or the 
woman — is better off in heaven than on 
earth. I resign this dear object of love 
and devotion, who has gone to a happier 
world." The ordinary consolations of 
institutional Christianity no longer satisfy 
intelligent people whose lives are broken 
by the sickness or premature death of 
those they love. The new religion will 
not attempt to reconcile men and women 
to present ill by promises of future blessed- 
ness, either for themselves or for others. 
Such promises have done infinite mischief 
in the world, by inducing men to be patient 
under sufferings or deprivations against 
which they should have incessantly 
struggled. The advent of a just freedom 
for the mass of mankind has been delayed 

[ 178 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

for centuries by just this effect of compensa- 
tory promises issued by churches. 

The religion of the future will approach 
the whole subject of evil from another 
side, that of resistance and prevention. 
The Breton sailor, who had had his arm 
poisoned by a dirty fish-hook which had 
entered his finger, made a votive offering at 
the shrine of the Virgin Mary, and prayed 
for a cure. The workman to-day, who 
gets cuts or bruised by a rough or dirty 
instrument, goes to a surgeon, who applies 
an antiseptic dressing to the wound, and 
prevents the poisoning. That surgeon is 
one of the ministers of the new religion. 
When dwellers in a slum suffer the familiar 
evils caused by overcrowding, impure food, 
and cheerless labor, the modern true be- 
lievers contend against the sources of such 
misery by providing public baths, play- 
grounds, wider and cleaner streets, better 
dwellings, and more effective schools, — 
that is, they attack the sources of physical 
and moral evil. The new religion cannot 
supply the old sort of consolation ; but 
it can diminish the need of consolation, 

[ J 79 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

or reduce the number of occasions for 
consolation. 

A further change in religious thinking 
has already occurred on the subject of hu- 
man pain. Pain was generally regarded as 
a punishment for sin, or as a means of 
moral training, or as an expiation, vicari- 
ous or direct. Twentieth-century religion, 
gradually perfected in this respect during 
the last half of the nineteenth century, re- 
gards human pain as an evil to be relieved 
and prevented by the promptest means 
possible, and by any sort of available 
means, physical, mental, or moral ; and, 
thanks to the progress of biological and 
chemical science, there is comparatively 
little physical pain nowadays which cannot 
be prevented or relieved. The invention 
of anaesthetics has brought into contempt 
the expiatory, or penal, view of human 
pain in this world. The younger gener- 
ations listen with incredulous smiles to the 
objection made only a little more than 
sixty years ago by some divines of the 
Scottish Presbyterian church to the em- 
ployment of chloroform in childbirth, 

[ 180 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

namely, that the physicians were interfer- 
ing with the execution of a curse pro- 
nounced by the Almighty. Dr. Weir 
Mitchell, a physician who has seen much 
of mental pain as well as of bodily, in his 
poem read at the fiftieth anniversary of 
the first public demonstration of surgical 
anaesthesia, said of pain : 

" What purpose hath it ? Nay, thy quest is vain : 
Earth hath no answer : If the baffled brain 
Cries, 'T is to warn, to punish, Ah, refrain ! 
When writhes the child, beneath the surgeon's 

hand, 
What soul shall hope that pain to understand ? 
Lo ! Science falters o'er the hopeless task, 
And Love and Faith in vain an answer 

ask." . . . 

A similar change is occurring in regard 
to the conception of divine justice. The 
evils in this world have been regarded as 
penalties inflicted by a just God on human 
beings who had violated his laws ; and the 
justice of God played a great part in his 
imagined dealings with the human race. 
A young graduate of Andover Theological 
Seminary once told me that when he had 

[ i«i 1 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

preached two or three times in summer in 
a small Congregational church on Cape 
Cod, one of the deacons of the church said 
to him at the close of the service, " What 
sort of sentimental mush is this that they are 
teaching you at Andover ? You talk every 
Sunday about the love of God ; we want 
to hear about his justice." The future 
religion will not undertake to describe, or 
even imagine, the justice of God. We are 
to-day so profoundly dissatisfied with hu- 
man justice, although it is the result of 
centuries of experience of social good and 
ill in this world, that we may well distrust 
human capacity to conceive of the justice 
of a morally perfect, infinite being. The 
civilized nations now recognize the fact 
that legal punishments usually fail of their 
objects, or cause wrongs and evils greater 
than those for which the punishments were 
inflicted ; so that penology, or the science 
of penalties, has still to be created. It is 
only very lately that the most civilized 
communities began to learn how to deal 
with criminal tendencies in the young. In 
the eyes of God human beings must all 

[ 182 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

seem very young. Since our ideas of 
God's modes of thinking and acting are 
necessarily based on the best human attain- 
ments in similar directions, the new religion 
cannot pretend to understand God's jus- 
tice, inasmuch as there is no human ex- 
perience of public justice fit to serve as the 
foundation for a true conception of God's. 
The new religion will magnify and laud 
God's love and compassion, and will not 
venture to state what the justice of God 
may, or may not, require of himself, or of 
any of his finite creatures. This will be 
one of the great differences between the 
future religion and the past. Institutional 
Christianity as a rule condemned the mass 
of mankind to eternal torment ; partly be- 
cause the leaders of the churches thought 
they understood completely the justice of 
God, and partly because the exclusive pos- 
session of means of deliverance gave the 
churches some restraining influence over 
even the boldest sinners, and much over 
the timid. The new religion will make no 
such pretensions, and will teach no such 
horrible and perverse doctrines. 

[ i8 3 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

Do you ask what consolation for human 
ills the new religion will offer ? I answer, 
the consolation which often comes to the 
sufferer from being more serviceable to 
others than he was before the loss or the 
suffering for which consolation is needed ; 
the consolation of being one's self wiser 
and tenderer than before, and therefore 
more able to be serviceable to human kind 
in the best ways ; the consolation through 
the memory, which preserves the sweet 
fragrance of characters and lives no longer 
in presence, recalls the joys and achieve- 
ments of those lives while still within 
mortal view, and treasures up and multi- 
plies the good influences they exerted. 
Moreover, such a religion has no tendency 
to diminish the force in this world, or any 
other, of the best human imaginings con- 
cerning the nature of the infinite Spirit 
immanent in the universe. It urges its 
disciples to believe that as the best and 
happiest man is he who best loves and 
serves, so the soul of the universe finds its 
perfect bliss and efficiency in supreme and 
universal love and service. It sees evi- 

1 18 4 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

dence in the moral history of the human 
race that a loving God rules the universe. 
Trust in this supreme rule is genuine con- 
solation and support under many human 
trials and sufferings. Nevertheless, al- 
though brave and patient endurance of 
evils is always admirable, and generally 
happier than timid or impatient conduct 
under suffering or wrong, it must be ad- 
mitted that endurance or constancy is not 
consolation, and that there are many physi- 
cal and mental disabilities and injuries for 
which there is no consolation in a literal 
sense. Human skill may mitigate or pal- 
liate some of them, human sympathy and 
kindness may make them more bearable, 
but neither religion nor philosophy offers 
any complete consolation for them, or 
ever has. 

In thus describing the consolations for 
human woes and evils which such a religion 
can offer, its chief motives have been de- 
picted. They are just those which Jesus 
said summed up all the commandments, 
love toward God and brotherliness to man. 
It will teach a universal good-will, under 

C 185 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

the influence of which men will do their 
duty, and at the same time, promote their 
own happiness. The devotees of a religion 
of service will always be asking what they 
can contribute to the common good ; but 
their greatest service must always be to in- 
crease the stock of good-will among men. 
One of the worst of chronic human evils 
is working for daily bread without any in- 
terest in the work, and with ill-will toward 
the institution or person that provides the 
work. The work of the world must be 
done ; and the great question is, shall it be 
done happily or unhappily ? Much of it 
is to-day done unhappily. The new re- 
ligion will contribute powerfully toward 
the reduction of this mass of unnecessary 
misery, and will do so chiefly by promot- 
ing good-will among men. 

A paganized Hebrew-Christianity has 
unquestionably made much of personal 
sacrifice as a religious duty. The new 
religion will greatly qualify the supposed 
duty of sacrifice, and will regard all sacri- 
fices as unnecessary and injurious, except 
those which love dictates and justifies. 

[ 186 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

cc Greater love hath no man than this, that 
a man lay down his life for his friends." 
Self-sacrifice is not a good or a merit in 
itself; it must be intelligent and loving to 
be meritorious, and the object in view 
must be worth its price. Giving up at- 
tractive pleasures or labors in favor of 
some higher satisfaction, or some engross- 
ing work, is not self-sacrifice. It is a re- 
nunciation of inferior or irrelevant objects 
in favor of one superior object; it is only 
the intelligent inhibition of whatever dis- 
tracts from the main pursuit, or the wor- 
thiest task. Here, again, the new religion 
will teach that happiness goes with duti- 
fulness even in this world. 

All the religions have been, to a greater 
or less extent, uplifting and inspiring, in 
the sense that they raised men's thoughts 
to some power above them, to some be- 
ing or beings, which had more power 
and more duration than the worshippers 
had. When kings or emperors were dei- 
fied, they were idealized, and so lifted 
men's thoughts out of the daily round of 
their ordinary lives. As the objects of 

[ i8 7 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

worship became nobler, purer, and kinder 
with the progress of civilization, the pre- 
vailing religion became more stimulating 
to magnanimity and righteousness. Will 
the future religion be as helpful to the 
spirit of man ? Will it touch his imagina- 
tion as the anthropomorphism of Judaism, 
polytheism, Islam, and paganized Christi- 
anity have done ? Can it be as moving 
to the human soul as the deified powers 
of nature, the various gods and goddesses 
that inhabited sky, ocean, mountains, 
groves, and streams, or the numerous dei- 
ties revered in the various Christian com- 
munions, — God the Father, the Son of 
God, the Mother of God, the Holy Ghost, 
and the host of tutelary saints ? All these 
objects of worship have greatly moved the 
human soul, and have inspired men to 
thoughts and deeds of beauty, love, and 
duty. Will the new religion do as much ? 
It is reasonable to expect that it will. The 
sentiments of awe and reverence, and the 
love of beauty and goodness, will remain, 
and will increase in strength and influence. 
All the natural human affections will re- 

[ 188 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

main in full force. The new religion will 
foster powerfully a virtue which is com- 
paratively new in the world — the love of 
truth and the passion for seeking it, and 
the truth will progressively make men free ; 
so that the coming generations will be 
freer, and therefore more productive and 
stronger than the preceding. The new 
religionists will not worship their ancestors ; 
but they will have a stronger sense of the 
descent of the present from the past than 
men have ever had before, and each gen- 
eration will feel more strongly than ever 
before its indebtedness to the preceding. 

The two sentiments which most inspire 
men to good deeds are love and hope. 
Religion should give freer and more ra- 
tional play to these two sentiments than 
the world has heretofore witnessed ; and 
the love and hope will be thoroughly 
grounded in and on efficient, serviceable, 
visible, actual, and concrete deeds and 
conduct. When a man works out a suc- 
cessful treatment for cerebro-spinal menin- 
gitis — a disease before which medicine 
was absolutely helpless a dozen years ago — 

1 18 9 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

by applying to the discovery of a remedy 
ideas and processes invented or developed 
by other men studying other diseases, he 
does a great work of love, prevents for the 
future the breaking of innumerable ties of 
love, and establishes good grounds for 
hope of many like benefits for human gen- 
erations to come. The men who do such 
things in the present world are ministers 
of the religion of the future. The future 
religion will prove, has proved, as effective 
as any of the older ones in inspiring men 
to love and serve their fellow-beings, — 
and that is the true object and end of all 
philosophies and all religions ; for that is 
the way to make men better and happier, 
alike the servants and the served. 

The future religion will have the attri- 
bute of universality and of adaptability to 
the rapidly increasing stores of knowledge 
and power over nature acquired by the 
human race. As the religion of a child is 
inevitably very different from that of an 
adult, and must grow up with the child, so 
the religion of a race whose capacities are 
rapidly enlarging must be capable of a cor- 

[ 190 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

responding development. The religion 
of any single individual ought to grow up 
with him all the way from infancy to age ; 
and the same is true of the religion of a 
race. It is bad for any people to stand 
still in their governmental conceptions and 
practices, or in the organization of their 
industries, or in any of their arts or trades, 
even the oldest ; but it is much worse for 
a people to stand still in their religious 
conceptions and practices. Now, the new 
religion affords an indefinite scope, or 
range, for progress and development. It 
rejects all the limitations of family, tribal, 
or national religion. It is not bound to 
any dogma, creed, book, or institution. It 
has the whole world for the field of the 
loving labors of its disciples ; and its fun- 
damental precept of serviceableness ad- 
mits an infinite variety and range in both 
time and space. It is very simple, and 
therefore possesses an important element 
of durability. It is the complicated things 
that get out of order. Its symbols will 
not relate to sacrifice or dogma ; but it 
will doubtless have symbols, which will 

[ 191 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

represent its love of liberty, truth, and 
beauty. It will also have social rites and 
reverent observances ; for it will wish to 
commemorate the good thoughts and deeds 
which have come down from former gen- 
erations. It will have its saints ; but its 
canonizations will be based on grounds 
somewhat new. It will have its heroes ; 
but they must have shown a loving, disin- 
terested, or protective courage. It will 
have its communions, with the Great Spirit, 
with the spirits of the departed, and with 
living fellow-men of like minds. Work- 
ing together will be one of its fundamental 
ideas, — of men with God, of men with 
prophets, leaders, and teachers, of men 
with one another, of men's intelligence 
with the forces of nature. It will teach 
only such uses of authority as are neces- 
sary to secure the co-operation of several 
or many people to one end ; and the dis- 
cipline it will advocate will be training in 
the development of co-operative good- 
will. 

Will such a religion as this make prog- 
ress in the twentieth-century world? You 

E 192 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

have heard in this Summer School of 
Theology much about the conflict be- 
tween materialism and religious idealism, 
the revolt against long-accepted dogmas, 
the frequent occurrence of waves of re- 
form, sweeping through and sometimes 
over the churches, the effect of modern 
philosophy, ethical theories, social hopes, 
and democratic principles on the estab- 
lished churches, and the abandonment of 
churches altogether by a large proportion 
of the population in countries mainly 
Protestant. You know, too, how other 
social organizations have, in some con- 
siderable measure, taken the place of 
churches. Millions of Americans find in 
Masonic organizations, lodges of Odd 
Fellows, benevolent and fraternal societies, 
granges, and trades-unions, at once their 
practical religion, and the satisfaction of 
their social needs. So far as these mul- 
tifarious organizations carry men and 
women out of their individual selves, 
and teach them mutual regard and social 
and industrial co-operation, they approach 
the field and functions of the religion of 
13 [ 193 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

the future. The Spiritualists, Christian 
Scientists, and mental healers of all sorts 
manifest a good deal of ability to draw 
people away from the traditional churches, 
and to discredit traditional dogmas and 
formal creeds. Nevertheless, the great 
mass of the people remain attached to the 
traditional churches, and are likely to re- 
main so, — -partly because of their tender 
associations with churches in the grave 
crises of life, and partly because their 
actual mental condition still permits them 
to accept the beliefs they have inherited 
or been taught while young. The new 
religion will therefore make but slow 
progress, so far as outward organization 
goes. It will, however, progressively 
modify the creeds and religious practices 
of all the existing churches, and change 
their symbolism and their teachings con- 
cerning the conduct of life. Since its 
chief doctrine is the doctrine of a sublime 
unity of substance, force, and spirit, and 
its chief precept is, Be serviceable, it will 
exert a strong uniting influence among 
men. 

[ 194 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

Christian unity has always been longed 
for by devout believers, but has been 
sought in impossible ways. Authorita- 
tive churches have tried to force every- 
body within their range to hold the same 
opinions and unite in the same observ- 
ances, but they have won only temporary 
and local successes. As freedom has in- 
creased in the world, it has become more 
and more difficult to enforce even outward 
conformity ; and in countries where church 
and state have been separated, a great 
diversity of religious opinions and practices 
has been expressed in different religious 
organizations, each of which commands 
the effective devotion of a fraction of the 
population. Since it is certain that men 
are steadily gaining more and more free- 
dom in thought, speech, and action, civil- 
ized society might as well assume that it 
will be quite impossible to unite all 
religiously minded people through any 
dogma, creed, ceremony, observance, or 
ritual. All these are divisive, not uniting, 
wherever a reasonable freedom exists. 
The new religion proposes as a basis of 

1 195] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

unity, first, its doctrine of an immanent 
and loving God, and, secondly, its precept, 
Be serviceable to fellow-men. Already 
there are many signs in the free countries 
of the world that different religious de- 
nominations can unite in good work to 
promote human welfare. The support 
of hospitals, dispensaries, and asylums by 
persons connected with all sorts of re- 
ligious denominations, the union of all 
denominations in carrying on Associated 
Charities in large cities, the success of the 
Young Men's Christian Associations, and 
the numerous efforts to form federations 
of kindred churches for practical purposes, 
all testify to the feasibility of extensive 
co-operation in good works. Again, the 
new religion cannot create any caste, eccle- 
siastical class, or exclusive sect founded on 
a rite. On these grounds it is not un- 
reasonable to imagine that the new religion 
will prove a unifying influence and a 
strong reinforcement of democracy. 

Whether it will prove as efficient to 
deter men from doing wrong and to en- 
courage them to do right as the prevailing 

[ 196 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

religions have been, is a question which 
only experience can answer. In these two 
respects neither the threats nor the prom- 
ises of the older religions have been re- 
markably successful in society at large. 
The fear of hell has not proved effective 
to deter men from wrong-doing, and 
heaven has never yet been described in 
terms very attractive to the average man 
or woman. Both are indeed unimagi- 
nable. The great geniuses, like Dante and 
Swedenborg, have produced only fantastic 
and incredible pictures of either state. 
The modern man would hardly feel any 
appreciable loss of motive-power toward 
good or away from evil if heaven were 
burnt and hell quenched. The prevail- 
ing Christian conceptions of heaven and 
hell have hardly any more influence with 
educated people in these days than Olym- 
pus and Hades have. The modern mind 
craves an immediate motive or leading 
good for to-day on this earth. The new 
religion builds on the actual experience of 
men and women and of human society as 
a whole. The motive powers it relies on 

[ *97 ] 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 

have been, and are, at work in innumer- 
able human lives ; and its beatific visions 
and its hopes are better grounded than 
those of traditional religion, and finer, — 
because free from all selfishness, and from 
the imagery of governments, courts, social 
distinctions, and war. 

Finally, this twentieth-century religion 
is not only to be in harmony with the 
great secular movements of modern society 
— democracy, individualism, social ideal- 
ism, the zeal for education, the spirit of 
research, the modern tendency to welcome 
the new, the fresh powers of preventive 
medicine, and the recent advances in busi- 
ness and industrial ethics — but also in 
essential agreement with the direct, per- 
sonal teachings of Jesus, as they are 
reported in the Gospels. The revelation 
he gave to mankind thus becomes more 
wonderful than ever. 



THE END 



24*1918 






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